Saturday 3 July 2010

On the right track

Germany makes the last 4. Here I was, head in the sand, expecting Maradonna's boys to demolish Germany. Well, yeah. Optimist =/= me. Now, though, having built so much momentum, I think our "Eleven" can make it all the way. Fourth World Cup? Adding another star to the three? Would be awesome.

Of course, Holland versus Germany could very well mean blood on the streets. There are some pairings that just spell trouble.

Amusing, how the Internet screams "Nazis" already. Klose is Polish. Ozil is Turkish. I think Podolski has Polish ancestors. Piotr Trochowski? Yes, that's a *really* German name right there.

The black kit? Awesome.

On the writing front, I've just pulled a story from a publisher that didn't give me an answer after three emails and subbed the story to one of my other pubs. It's not my favourite thing in the world to do, but there goes.

On the front of new writing, I've spent some time thinking about the scorpion story and talked things through with Gileonnen. After prodding at some elements that stand there and that I don't want to rewrite, I think I have enough plot to fill a full-sized novel. So that's what I'm now writing. It's grown to enough complexity go warrant that. If I can keep the intensity on that level, things are good. If I can't, well, at least I tried.

When push comes to shove, I never have any qualms about self-publishing, either. Editing is no big deal, I know several cover artist there (and would be happy to pay a pro, anyway). Which is to say I'm worried that this novel is too dark and too intense for most pubs. Casperian might be a good fit, I'm thinking, after they put out the brilliant Administration Series by Manna Francis, and The Rage of Achilles. But all options are open at this point. I just want to have paper copies of this one if I really do go the full 60-80k length.

Will have to check. But that's counting the chickens before they've hatched.

And I got through my first week at work alright. The only problem I'm seeing with the place is their very strict Internet policy. Means I'm not getting distracted by personal email, but also means I come home to 200-250+ emails every day. So I switched off several author loops that just consisted of a hundred one-liner emails every day, left some groups, put others on "web only" and several on "daily digest". That cut down my emails, so far, to around 50, which is manageable and doesn't kill off my writing time. I much rather focus on the communities like Goodreads and Facebook and Livejournal and direct personal email than read author loop mails all day.

This networking thing is a time-eater, and I have to be careful not to damage the writing.

Talking of which, I'm going to work on the scorpion story today. At the moment, the vibe I'm getting is way less m/m romancy and way more gay fantasy (with lots of explicit sex), but I'll see where it goes. So far, I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out.

2 comments:

  1. Romancy? Is that what you're going for? lol, I'm sorry, but when I think of romancy type books, yours don't come to mind.

    That's a compliment. ;)

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  2. *laughs* Yeah. I mean HEA/HFN and one strong relationship at the core. At the moment, it's not going that way...

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