[As usual, three weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]
Week’s a little inside out, so instead of D&D game on Monday, it happened today. Just got home to the reminder that it’s Tuesday. Also just saw that one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th Century died. Dolly Parton was 80 and when you read the obit, they mention all the things she accomplished. And it’s a lot.
Her and Chuck Tingle have generally set the bar on how a famous creative should behave in public. She was always quiet and gracious, and let her money make the world a better place. Dr. Tingle always has something uplifting to say.
Lessons for people.
Writing: Belle #2 is begun. Working my way into an opening trilogy, but it will be an ongoing series, I think. Dunno. Don’t have to know. Need three of them in order to publish, because fans expect three books in a series before they’ll touch it. Can’t say I blame them, either.
Also writing some Mick on the side, for those of you on the list. Really exploring some of the darker elements of sci fi with him and Andi. Not sure where it goes.
Also started an assassin story. And literally picked a name and started running. Originally, it looked like a flash piece right around 2,000 words, but then writer brain helpfully dropped a romantic subplot on me so it’s going longer. Since I’m planning to explore more rom-com SF at some point (Albert and Jane), it’s worth writing short pieces. Especially if I can mix Thriller and Romance (romantic, basically, with a lot of energy and tension at cross purposes.) If anybody is into that sort of thing, give a yell and you can do a first read pass on it when I get done. Doesn’t FEEL like a novel, but might run into novella land. I am literally writing this one into darkness, stopping occasionally to figure out what happens next, rather than even having an end point in mind.
Romantic shapes things. Action-Thriller shapes things. Figure I can intersect those two and it will work out well enough. The joy of what I do is that I can write something and publish it and if it doesn’t resonate, I keep going. It’s not like I am dedicating an entire year to one project that makes or breaks my career.
Honestly, the worst thing that might happen is that it explodes into the cultural zeitgeist (Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, etc.) and suddenly the world demands that I write a lot more into that weird niche category. At the speed I write, that’s not mind-breaking. Just means less of other things.
And if there is that much money on the table, I’m willing to whore myself out. We all cash that paycheck, after all.
So I never publish anything that I wouldn’t be happy expanding into more. Same goes for all the erotica, as I have started pulling that stuff out of the trunk and publishing it (ask if you don’t know that penname. Not a secret, so much as a solid divide between him and Blaze so folks don’t get confused and angry when they run into adults consentually adulting at one another enthusiastically.)
Past that, finishing up both Ollie and Heather over the next six weeks. Lovely series. Had lots of fun with them. But I finished them a while ago and am kinda ready for them to be off my radar for a while. More Maddox and Doctor Kay, then the Kohahu Trilogy (Daughter of the Shogun), followed by Harri the Merchant. Planning a kickstarter in the spring for Corsac Fox 8, then dropping it in July of next year, give or take. Belle or Scattered Tribes after that, depending.
With that, y’all enjoy your Tuesday and I’m looking forward to September turning things a little more normalish around here.
shade and sweet water,
b
West of the Mountains, WA
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