All over the place...again.

Like many writers, I often battle a form of ADD when it comes to what I am writing.  And right now I am in the throes of yet another fight.  On the one hand, I have a research paper that is due next week.  I am making slow progress on it in the evenings, but it will be a challenge to get it to the required length.  I probably should have picked a better topic.  Oh, well.  Too late now.  And I have also registered for my next class, which starts in October.  I'm apparently a glutton for academic punishment.

Then there's the fact that playing HALO 3 on my xBox inspired me to start reading the novels, which in turn inspired me to start writing some military sci-fi of my own again.  Today, my attention seems to be focused on that.  I have already laid down nearly 500 words, and am only halfway through the scene I want to finish.  I'm taking some old, discarded ideas, and mashing them together to form a new one.  I do that a lot, actually.  But, I guess a lot of writers do.

Yesterday, my writing brain went to some heated social issues, and I felt compelled to write a short essay on one of them.  This essay will only be seen by a few people because it is a volatile subject, and I know that some people I consider close friends would be offended by it.  So, I will keep it mostly private, and chalk it up to ineffectual ranting.

Last night my friend Ken called me (just as I was sitting down to a few minutes of HALO...he has a knack for doing that), and we chatted a bit about writing.  Ken is one of the friends that I am attempting to put together an Sword & Sorcery anthology with, based on an original shared world.  We discussed that briefly, and I had to admit that I hadn't made any progress on it in a while. 

We also discussed ePublishing.  Ken is writing a serial of eShorts about an adolescent vampire that is really good.  But he is having a hard time finding an audience for it.  We're pretty sure that the target demographic (the Twi-hard crowd) has too short of an attention span for serialized stories.  he's considering pulling the stories he has, combining them and finishing the larger story, and republishing it as an eNovel.  I think that's his best bet, honestly.

And speaking of ePublishing, I am finally putting up another story for Kindle.  I had published THE ORC WAY (a sequel of sorts to PEKRA) last night, after laboring over the cover image.  But this morning, I realized I had made a formatting error, and the thing looks awkward in places.  So, I unpublished it, and corrected the errors, as well as made some content edits today.  Tonight, I will rework the cover image, since I am not all that happy with how it turned out, and try to republish it again.  I'll make an announcement tomorrow when it is available.

And finally there is the Sword & Planet story for Scott Oden's newest anthology idea.  I had made great progress on it, going so far as to write a complete synopsis (something I am only now learning how to do), and working through the first couple of scenes.  However, it seemed overly long for the 10k word limit, so I had cut a huge chunk out of the middle.  I sent it to Scott, and asked his opinions.  He said it could be 10k words, if written right.  But his main concern was that it wasn't very S&P, and seemed more like S&S or Alternate History.  It was then that I realized that all of the S&P elements (superscience technology, non-human races) were in the part that I had cut out!  Ugh.  back to the drawing board.  Now I'm not sure if I should rework the story, or just start over with something new.

Over on the personal front, my 17-year old daughter went back to Vegas last weekend.  I already miss her.  But the good news (unrelated to her leaving) is that we are trying to buy a house.  If we get the one we like, I will finally have room for a library and writer's den!  WOOHOO!!