The goal for this year is to write six eight-post serial stories in a variety of genres and settings and I’m looking for some input into which ones!

Those of you who have stopped by the Serial Story page can see that the Feb-Apr story is already in the works: “Three Tequila, Floor” from Tales of the Drunken Unicorn‘verse (Comedy, Urban Fantasy). But I’m still pondering what should come next… Continue reading →

Rough drafts are better than no drafts.

Is that always true? Of course not, but for where I am as a writer I have come to the conclusion that it’s a truth I need to embrace for 2012.

I won’t have polished stories to post in the next year. Not because I don’t want to have them, but because I’m not at a place yet where I have learned how to finish things. Continue reading →

Best Laid Plans

I’ve spent the last few days putting around with In Dreams of Trees, but it’s time to put that book aside to ferment and focus on what I need to do in 2012.

It’s odd thinking of writing in the same mindset as I’m thinking about the horses. The idea of non-NaNo deadlines and posting schedules and targeted audience building is strange—but it’s something I need to get settled in before January rolls around. Continue reading →

Stories Yet To Be

One of the things I am working into my Master Plan for next year is they idea of selling one-time ‘tickets’ to serial stories. The stories would be free to read for a period of time and then fall into a pay-to-read status. (More info on this in the Selling Serial Stories post on Everyday Dragons.)

But in order to sell content, I need to have content. The horror!

I also need to have content that works well with a serialized blog post, and that’s a bit more complicated than I had expected. Continue reading →

It has been a bit of a crazy month and my latest Novel_in_90 fell by the wayside much more rapidly than I feared.

The main fault, I think, was starting with an established storyline. I spent a good bit of time cat-waxing over trying to get everything to match up well with what had gone before. (Sadly an even larger chunk of time was spent trying to track down all of the files in which ‘what had come before’ were saved.)

So this time I’m going to start with a blank page and slightly more organized intentions.

I’ve plotted out an hour each morning in which to get the 750 words done, and a bit of time in the evening to format it properly for posting. This attempt will be a bit more linear and thus an entertaining read (I hope) for anyone who wants to follow the madness.

Now I’m off to setup the treadmill-laptop for the first of the four 15 minute writing sessions I hope to get done today. We’ll see how the wordcounts roll…

I’ve started to wonder recently if the idea that a writer needs to seek out a quiet place to work is a personal fallacy. I’ve held it to be true for– well, nigh on forever at this point, but when I think back across the years it has rarely ever been true.

“I write best up at the cabin in Maine.”

We went up to my grandparents cabin in Maine every summer when I was a kid. For a month or two we’d spend time playing on the rocky seashore, fishing, and enjoying our break from ‘real life’. (Which included running water, telephones, but thankfully not electricity.) Continue reading →

I have a rather impressive pile of works-in-progress at the moment. Actually, if you count the daily snippits and the story prompts in the totals… I have a rather terrifying pile of works-in-progress.

But, as has been said by writers much smarter than I: “Ideas are not the hard part of writing.”

So, my self-assignment for this week is to pick a WIP to work on starting next Saturday. (I’d start tomorrow, but work is busy being work and I doubt I’m going to want to do much more than nap when I get home.)

I’m going to be reading through all of the novels-in-progress as well as the snippits and story prompts– hopefully something will catch my Muses.

But for right now, I’m going to go watch Lost…

I’ve always wanted to tell stories for a living.

Of course I’ve wanted to other things as well (breed riding cows, build robot dragons, rule a computer kingdom as a Sysadmin, write computer games, etc.)

But wanting is not doing.

I feel like inscribing that in giant letters over my desks at home and at work so that I have to stare at it day in and day out.

Some childhood dreams are meant to die when reality and adulthood start gnawing away at life –I’ll miss you giant robot dragons!– but not all of them. I’ve spent my quasi-adulthood in nothing more than regretful daydreams about how much fun it would be to be the person I thought I would grow into.

For every grand scheme and master plan I whip up to make those dreams into reality, I can think of a thousand good reasons not to try. All of my objections are perfectly logical and rationally sound, but in the end, what are these negative ‘but if’s’ but stories?

It’s time to change my verb.

Time to get moving again.

Whenever I stop reading, I stop writing. It’s odd how wound together the two actions are– you’d think reading would cancel out writing. After all, if I’m writing for my own enjoyment wouldn’t reading someone else’s stories fill that niche? What does it matter if the stories that are unfolding before me are mind or not?

Apparently my Muses are picky sorts. For ever story I read and enjoy, those little voices in the back of my head keep insisting they could do it better. (Whether they could or not is a hotly debated topic, but I’ve learned never to argue with them when they get riled up). So it looks like reading is definitely back on my plate as ‘something I should be doing more of’, I just have to start finding the time…

Tomorrow is always a new day.

You’d think it would be easy for me to slip back into writing– after all, I have a almost two hundred story prompts I could play with, or several dozen half-started stories and universes. Heck, I spent a good few hours yesterday just reading through the nine million posts I have archived (a slight exaggeration, but still). There are so many ideas just waiting to be acted on, so many stories I need to finish telling… it’s actually rather depressing.

So I’ve decided it would be best to take a more NaNoWriMo approach to getting back in the flow. Start from scratch, no expectations, no internal editor (but definitely an internal spell-check, because NaNo 2009 had some scary lunchtime drafts. o_O;;), just a nice white space and a word count. If it turns into an actual story, all the better, but for now I’m going to be happy with words on the page.

For the next seven days my goal will be 100 words of story a day. Not a lot, but I figure on the bad days when I can think of anything, 100 words will at least seem possible… where 750 (Novel_in_90) or 1,667 (NaNoWriMo) feel well nigh impossible. With luck, I’ll be able to raise the bar a bit every ‘week’, but I’ll worry about that later. For now, I just need to finish up this post and fire up Q10.

Muses away!

There is a contest over on Nathan Bransford’s blog (The 3rd Sort-of-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge) that is asking for the first paragraph of works-in-progress.

You would think with all the writing I’ve got online that finding a first paragraph that would knock the socks off the competition would be easy. … You would be somewhat less than correct. There is apparently a LOT of writing in The One True Archive folder that has never made it online. In the interest of having several copies of everything (and thus protecting Ye Olde Fic) I’m going to have to start working out what I have where. Of all the stories I have in the various states of WIP-ness, only The Gate to Fenrith Lei had an opening paragraph worth posting. And Gate, bless it’s heart, has the slowest opening in the history of Martha-fic. *sighs*

But it’s posted, which is something, and maybe I’ll get my butt in gear and get something over to Evil Editor. I posted the synopsis for Rise and Walk once upon a time, but I haven’t been back to play lately. I really need to get myself up an out of this non-writing rut I’ve been in. *pokes Muses* November cometh!

Ah well, back to some word sprints, and hopefully a decent nightly wordcount for Silverwitch.

…keeping them. *sighs*

But on that note, I’ll be doing some 10 minute sprints today in the hopes I can just start the nine million WIPs I have. (In fact one of the 10 minute projects is simply making a list of the WIPs. Which will probably take more than 10 minutes. *headdesk*) If all goes well I should end up with a bunch of little scenes that help build up the worlds and the characters. Sort of like fan fiction for my original fiction… only I have just as many WIPs there as I do here.

But I’m going to try and put together a plan that focuses more on keeping myself interested in the projects, and less on planning my moves ahead of time. I think if I can just keep up the fire to write and stop trying to force myself to write specific things at specific times it might work better for me. I am a very attention span deficient writer. An lo, the world is full of SHINY. *solemn nod*

So I’m going to try (once again) to get this blog back up and running. Daily story snippits, work-in-progress reports, Saturday Story Prompts… the whole works!

If all goes well, I should be able to get things going to the point where I can finally get the serial story I owe Beth back up and running. *crosses fingers* And once I have a suitable backlog of Good Drafts, I’ll be hopping back on the OWW and posting things. Of course that’s all a Best Case scenario, but hey, I can dream! ^_~ *grin*

If nothing else, it will get me ready for the glory of this year’s NaNoWriMo! >.<;;

So happy Tuesday to everyone, and look for new content sometime tonight or tomorrow!