Friday, May 25, 2012

It's Been a Week! What Have I been Up To?

Who's a bad blogger who hasn't updated in a week? Yes, that would be me.

That said, I got both short stories off, (one has already been accepted, but it's Sekrut until I am given the green light). With those done, I was thinking about writingt a story for Cthulhurotica II, but I've just been itching to get back to the novel I put down a year and a half ago. And yes, it's bad to stop writing a novel, but I was back in school and all of my time and much of my brain was eaten by Chemistry.

I love writing this novel. I started it because I overall dislike its genre, and decided to find a way to make it my own. Could I write a novel about something I didn't love? The answer, at 57,000 words, is yes. And novels give the writer a chance to breathe, to expand on their ideas, keeping an eye on the pace, but without the intensive crunch and relentless word-counting of short stories. I still like writing shorts, but there's a liberty to a novel that lets me really develop character and plant foreshadowing and become very complex. Of course, I'll have to sell said novel, and that'll be a good indicator as to whether I was successful.

I've been having fun (and a bit of frustration) with the 20-year old Red Baron game. My reviews of pre-1990 WWI flight games are all done, and I'm wondering if I should blog them, or just make a new section of my website. Unfortunately, playing and writing about premodern flight sims is scratching my nonfiction writing itch, which is cutting into my blogging.

Dynamix 1990 Red Baron

I've just torn through a novel, the first time I've done this for some time. Three Cheers for Me is the first of a series of comedy novels about a Canadian flier in WWI. The Bandy Papers series is sort of a combination of Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster and W.E. Johns' Bigglesworth, goofy social novels, uniquely Canadian, with the protagonist flying about in a Camel. I plan on getting the next couple of novels (until the end of the Great War) at least.

And it's time, past time, to get my shorts back out on the market. I've got a number of shorts that have not sold, that I think can sell, but haven't had the time or inclination to put out there. I'm thinking about saving "Nicaragua 1986" for Shroud magazine, partially because I want to appear under the same cover as Brain keene. But "Three Dreams" "Too Short For an Angel" and "Ultra-Fast Delivery" all need to get sold.

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