This was taken during my first real long distance hike up Cedar Mountain. The deer was gracious enough to allow two photos to be taken before they made a right turn down the mountainside (as you're facing the photo).
I know the blog post title sounds just a tad redundant, but I made the mistake of trying to publish my book in July, which is the busy season for publishing. The end result to this madness is that timelines are often stretched out, which for people like myself who don't have real deadlines to meet, are sometimes put on the back burner.
So the seriously obvious answer to the question posted above is keep writing. But what should you specifically write to keep yourself occupied? Short stories? I cranked out about ten short stories of various word counts from a low end of 2,500 to a high end of about 12k. How about a novel? I don't quite have the brain capacity for writing another full length novel. What about writing a novella? I might have the brain capacity for that.
But where would I get the germination of a story idea for a novella? That is a toughie, but it was a problem that I was willing to tackle, so to speak. I had one that I had recently put on the back burner this past spring because it was becoming a cluster....bomb of a mess, so I actually thought about taking another look at it. But the idea that I eventually came up to fix it was one that would need some serious brain capacity to work on and that was something I really didn't want to pursue (changing the character focus completely around by making the incidental characters the main focus and the main characters the incidental focus).
So I turned to the short stories that I had previously written, which I had previously talked about here. While nine of the ten stories written were major rewrites that ultimately used the original story as a outline, nine of those stories didn't possess anything that would inspire me to explore further. But that tenth one, it had everything needed to nudge me to take that risk of expanding it.
What did it possess, you may ask?
The short story possessed the ending. I originally rewrote it to emphasize that the assignment that the main character was to carry out was their final chance to actually complete an assignment, or face the ultimate consequence for failing to launch. I'll still have to re-re-write it again to make it fit the setting/aesthetic of the novella, which will be feudal Japan, specifically the Shogunate eras of feudal Japan.
Which if you think about it, is a lot easier to research than it was to research my fantasy series. I mean, one country (Japan) as opposed to four continents and two planets, one of which was due to world building; one time period versus multiple times periods; and finally one ethnicity/culture (Japan) versus six (five original: Mayan, Aztec, Incas, American and English; and one made-up: Pod People).
So after choosing the story that seems to promise a whole lot of prior to that could be successfully written to turn it into a novella of some kind (trust me, I already have, based on the actual content of this story, mentally written the entire outline of how events should unfold leading up to this particular ending, which is something I almost never do), the issue now becomes how much time I can spend mentally/physically working on it while waiting for the creaky wheels of self-publishing to advance back into my personal realm of frivolity.
The main reason as to why I'm waffling about devoting all kinds of time and energy to this novella is once I get the manuscript completely formatted for e-publishing (KDP, e-pub and Word), I'll have to apply the brakes as I need to pass on the specifics for the print version of the cover. And that can easily become a cluster....bomb of titanic proportions if I'm not careful.
So presently, I am following my own advice and have started working on yet another novella while waiting for phase one of my book to come back to me. My only hope is that I can easily pick up the proverbial pieces to the novella and re-start from where I had originally left off at, and not have it turn into something that showed so much early promise, only to flame out faster than a flambe dish at a fancy restaurant.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Lay it on me, because unlike others, I can handle it.