Category: Writing

Weird Wednesday: State of the Author, April 2023

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Fantasy, Freebie, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingLeave a comment

Here’s where I am at these days:

–Spider Star, aka Star Master Book 2: this has been released and is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers right now. It will leave KU on June 3, so if you are a KU subscriber, I would advise you to download it before then and read at your leisure. When it leaves KU, I will be raising the price on Shadow Captain (the first book in the series), so keep that in mind as well. Later in June, I will work on putting Spider Star up on the other ebook vendors and setting up an AI-voiced audiobook at Google Play.

-Hunter Healer King, Book 1: Currently a shade under 10K words of a projected 70K, so I think it’s safe to call this an actual work in progress. If you frequent some of the other places I visit online, you may have seen me call this one “the Gothic Dunedain project” or “the Steampunk Dunedain project.” Basically this is a monster-hunting gothic fantasy with a steampunk angle and some Tolkienian tropes thrown in, like an ancient line of kingly monster-hunters who come from a lost civilization. No Elves or Dwarves so far. The plan is to serialize it on Vella, once completed, and then use any feedback to help in turning it into a conventional ebook.

-Regency Sleuth: At 4K of a projected 70K, this is still in the exploratory stages. Call it an “almost-WIP.” It’s not set in the actual Regency, just in a vaguely British Regency like place with minor fantasy elements (so far consisting of a single empath, whose abilities are not so far very useful in solving mysteries). I’m finding that writing a mystery calls for a very different approach so I’m kind of feeling my way through the process. I do like new challenges though, which is why I switch up genres when I finish with a particular setting. If completed, this one will possibly cycle through Vella as well.

-Ancestors of Jaiya: I may get some help stomping typos for these, and if so, I will set up AI-voiced audiobooks for them on Google Play.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at in the writing process. Feel free to share your opinions below.

Weird Wednesday: Chicken or the Egg

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I used to think of myself as someone who starts writing with a protagonist (and a set of foils) and a situation, sometimes with an outline hitting the high points of where we needed to go. A recent conversation elsewhere made me realize that, by the time that happens, I’ve usually spent a lot of time daydreaming about different genres and world-building different settings, and I’m selecting the protagonist and the situation because they go with a setting/genre I was already playing with. *Shrug* not important, just interesting.

Get Spider Star for Free!

Posted on Posted in Freebie, Marketing, Space Opera, Weird Science, World Building, WritingLeave a comment

Spider Star, the second and final book in my space opera series, is now live, and free for all Kindle readers until March 28, 2023. If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, it will be free until June 3, 2023, when it leaves Kindle enrollment.

You may know me from my clean fantasy romance novels in the Jaiya series and the Ancestors of Jaiya series. My new space operas, called the Star Master series, have less romance, but still combine adventure, mysticism and fun characters, while avoiding harsh language, graphic violence and sexuality. Shadow Captain was written with fans of Star Wars, Firefly, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda in mind.

If Spider Star sounds like it would interest you, feel free to check it out on Amazon now.

Weird Mardi Gras: Rachael Aaron and the Time-Knowledge-Enthusiasm Triangle

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Weird Science, WritingLeave a comment

This article’s advice is: know what you plan to write, find a way to get excited about what you plan to write, find your must productive writing time/place and use it. It’s about the most useful thing I’ve ever read about the writing process.

http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

Weird Wednesday: Leaving Twitter

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Well that didn’t last long. Twitter was fun, but enabled too much of the snarkier, ruder side of my personality, and exposed me (even with the world’s most aggressive blocking approach) to more negative news than is probably good for me. After being seeing how rude I had gotten in my comments on another person’s WordPress site, I decided to deactivate my twitter account, to reduce the dopamine hits I’ve been getting from my own snark, and see if that helps. I’ve been neglecting my own WordPress site, so will try to focus more attention on that, and generally do my best to mind my own business.

Happy New Year, I Just Finished Revising Star Master Book 2

Posted on Posted in Scrivener, Space Opera, WritingTagged Leave a comment

Complete at a shade under 94,000 words. Next step is to get it out of Scrivener and into a Word document for my volunteer editors to review. They will be out of town for part of this coming week, so I have a little bit of a breather to get the Word document ready. I should feel more triumphant than I do, but I’ve been fighting with this one in one form or another since November 2020, so by now all I can muster is a bit of weary relief, in the style of Best Van Helsing.

Weird Wednesday: Weirdest NaNoWriMo After-Action Report

Posted on Posted in Editing, NaNoWriMo, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, WritingLeave a comment

Well, I was about halfway through the edit on Spiderstar, the sequel to Shadow Captain, when NaNoWriMo started. When it ended, I only had about 15K words left to edit, and now I’m down to 10K-ish. After that, comes review by my volunteer beta readers/editors, cover art, final revisions, and publication. Publication is a moving target; looking like late January/early February of 2023 at this point.

In other news, I am most likely looking at another radical shift in genre for my next set of novels. Stay tuned.

Weird Wednesday: Why is It Furry?

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I generally like Moleskine notebooks. I don’t have any good reason for it. They feel right in the hand (do you know that bit in Princess Bride, the book, about a sword’s balance? Like that). The fancy limited editions make easier for me to keep tabs on where particular ideas might be: alot of the early concept work for Star Master is in the yellowish orange Gundam notebook, my initial reactions to seeing Orgoglio e Preguidizio for the first time are in the green and beige Oz notebook, but also some of them were later transcribed to the blue 007 notebook, which also houses an awful lot of fantasy mystery brainstorming, and so on. I’ve even found a velvet-covered one at a price I could live with. Even so, I find myself asking, why is there a furry moleskine? And why is it sold out?

Weird Wednesday: So, About NaNoWriMo…

Posted on Posted in Music, NaNoWriMo, Space Opera, WritingTagged Leave a comment

Right now, I’m still revising the sequel to Shadow Captain. So, basically, this is going to be more of a NaNoEdMo until I get that completed. If I somehow miraculously get done in the first half of November, I might try for an actual first-drafting project, in the NaNo tradition. I have occasionally managed full 50K words in two-ish weeks, but it’s been a long time. So, here’s a cover version of my NaNoWriMo theme song, because somehow this situation doesn’t seem to call for Jerry Reed.

Weird Wednesday: Poohs and Prejudice

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Okay, that might have been a overly click-baity way of talking about the fact that A. A. Milne (author of Winnie-the-Pooh), once adapted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the stage. The BBC broadcast a radio version in 1967, with Derek Jacobi voicing Darcy. Surviving copies of the play in book-form will set you back a few hundred dollars, but you can listen to the radio adaptation for free.