Yes, it’s been awhile since I published anything on this site (or on Amazon, actually), so I thought I’d bring you up to speed on what I’ve been up to these past few months.
Firstly, there was the holiday season, including NaNoWriMo, which I participated in again this year (and won! Yay!), and then Christmas of course. Always keeps me on my toes.
Got a new computer. Still learning how to make it work well for writing. It didn’t come with Microsoft Office, and since Microsoft is being stoopid and not letting people buy a package including only the programs they want instead of stuff they don’t while charging an arm and a leg for the privilege of using a software product they don’t actually get to own–or better yet, requiring a monthly subscription (buwahahahaha!)!–I decided to ditch Microsoft and go with a freebie company. Why pay for the cow, right?
Still, it’s a new software package and it’ll take some getting used to.
Nevertheless, I am writing. I’ve produced over 80K words since October. And yes, once more, I have wa-ay too many irons in the fire. It involves the creation of two entirely new series.
But wait! Before you scream AAUUGGHH! at me, lemme ‘splain: For about a year now, I’ve been toying with a new approach to story telling. Rather than writing a full length novel (and of course I’m still doing those!), I want to try writing a set of smaller stories in serial format. I began with a rather dark retelling of Gilligan’s Island (it involves each of the castaways as representative of one of the seven deadly sins with Gilligan as the devil–oh never mind!), and then got inspired by Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle and came up with a Christian adventure story set in the Republic of the Pacific States (which I imagined long before they started threatening to break away from the U.S. due to the Trump victory, I promise!), where Christianity is illegal and the government is run according to the rules of political correctness. As I got into the story, however, I quickly realized that I didn’t know how to write a story in serial format. It kept coming out as a rather long-winded novel. Not what I was after.
I shelved it, and for NaNoWriMo this year, began work on a different story called Elementals, dealing with four characters who each possess some ability to control an element or have some kind of superpower (think Heroes or The Flash, but a little less outlandish), and who come together to try to make life work. At any rate, the important thing is that I’m figuring out how to write in serial form, where each episode is self-contained, and yet also advances a major story arc. I plan to take this approach and reapply it to the Christian story, because I think that concept is a little bit better and more in line with my kind of fiction. I’ll still finish Elementals and put it out there, but it’s just written for fun and on my end, to learn. I’ve planned on at least six episodes for this one. The Christian story is far more involved, with at least three seasons of seven episodes each in consideration. I don’t know yet how well I’ll be able to get it done, but I aim to try.
In the meantime, I still have to finish up Jefferson’s Road along with many of my other projects. But I’m writing much more rapidly now than before, and I can often crank out 2K words in about an hour and a half. I hope to keep writing at least this much every day. True, I haven’t exactly done it every day yet this month (wow! Is it really the 9th already?), but its better to set a high goal and miss it than to set a low goal and miss that one too.
Harumph! (unpublishable)!
What I say? I’m working on it!