Thursday, January 10, 2008

Checking In . . .

I am rapidly approaching another deadline and find myself tottering back and forth on what to do. I started a piece for Samhain Publishing, for the psychic powers submission request, which wants a manuscript up to 30K words. Sounds pretty easy - right?

It started out that way. I picked 2 different ideas from my 'Ideas' file, combined them with another ROI (randomly occurring idea) and voila! I had everything for a great plot. I picked my names, developed the world/mythology (mostly in my head) and started writing. I don't know why, but it came out in the first person. It's probably still easiest for me to write from that point of view, since that is where most of my experience lies. It also made the main character, Alex come to life very quickly - with a unique voice. I'm having fun with it. A little too much fun. As always, I'm getting carried away, and this 30K words is growing into a novel.

I think I will do my best to trim it down, maybe even drop a subplot or two and give it a HFN ending and submit it. Since my primary goal at this phase is to gain readership by getting my name out there (i.e. get published) it seems a waste to let any call for submissions pass me by. Though I will keep the expanded version of the story - you never know.

I'm excited to get started on my novel though - and the submissions slow down after January, giving me time to do just that while I'm waiting to hear back. The best news so far is that I appear to be just as prolific as ever. I've written about 60K words of good quality stuff in the last month and a half, and outlined a novel series.

And now for a random laugh, when all else fails, just pick yourself up and . . .




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