Sunday 26 September 2010

Hitting 30k

After really too much time spent staring at the screen, "Scorpion" has hit 30k yesterday. 30,600 words, to be exact, but I tend to not round up with wordcounts - what's acceptable in financial journalism (hey, what's a billion between friends when you're talking trillions?) feels sleazy and dishonest in writing. Dunno. Funny mind.

So this will quite conceivably turn into a novel... which makes me start to look at the options I have among publishers. The fact that some of them seem to do paper when things get above 60k and others do paper only when it sells well enough in ebook - that's a pretty strong incentive to do the "paper immediately" route. I just like paper. I started as a paper author, and I do like having paperbacks on my trophy shelf. Even if I sell more ebooks (so far, my print sales are still higher than my ebook sales... but the market is young and we'll see where things go).

I have a very strong image of the cover of "Scorpion" (talk about putting the roof on before the walls are up). I'm seeing, as the central element, to the right of the cover image, the raised tail of a scorpion, all shiny black chitin. I should not be doing that and leave cover artists to their devices and pretty much embrace whatever comes back... but that's very very difficult when the image is so strong.

I also find that expressions I coined are creeping into my every day mundane thoughts. "Gods below" as a curse/invective, like "heaven above". It makes the gods of that world seem pretty sinister - and they are, since they are fictional. This is a fantasy world without gods. These people are alone, and many of them know it. Atheist fantasy.

I'll balance that out with the "Avatar" series - or novel - I'm planning to write next. It's basically a rip-off of all my unfinished, unpublished work on that fantasy world I'd been building for years and years and that never amounted to anything. Now that I can write it in the genre these are meant to be in without fear of getting the "ewww" from your the usual fantasy mainstream crowd in Germany - I feel this could flow quite freely. The shame about German fantasy is - that most of those books are being targeted at a target group that is only too real, and still completely fictional, because they are not as dominant as the publishers think.

Books are chosen to be published if they fit for the pimpled sixteen year old boys or lives still with mama polo shirted doughy bachelors.

I'm happy and productive, and I still work too hard, but it feels far more sustainable now than it was. Settling into my rhythm again. Not working until complete exhaustion settles in. I'm just plugging away at this and that's an awesome prospect.

Here's to winter, and 2011.

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