ready to wear

Intriguing phrase of the day: sacred geometry

Popped up during a Google search and I was like, man, that's gotta go in a story somewhere. We'll see.

So last week I wrote a new short in record time... the idea hit me Monday and by the time Thanksgiving rolled around it had a beginning, a middle and an end. I like to call that a rough draft. It's a twisted little piece of sci-fi, but I kinda like it.

I polished it over the weekend and sent it to some friends to run their eyeballs over. It's under 5,000 words which is YAY! saleable. My short stories tend to run long. Well, that's not exactly true. I would vocally defend the lengths of even my longest efforts. There are some stories that just need a certain amount of space to breathe. I'm not going to cut them off at the knees because of editorial requirements.

Still, it's nice to have one that is a very comfortable size for selling. Ready-to-wear, ya know what I mean? Electric Spec will get the first crack at it.

zestfully clean

Am I the only person who gets their best story ideas in the shower?

rabble rouser

Dayum! Jenny Cruisie takes Miss Snark to the cleaners! Anyone up for an interweb cat-fight?

I've honestly been over Miss Snark for a while, for many of the reasons Cruisie outlines. At some point she stopped giving helpful advice and started being "Gee, look how clever and right I am!" Also, I don't have a lot of respect for anonymous bloggers who regularly rip on their commenters.

Two reasons I respect le Editor de Eville*: he doesn't pretend to be dishing out anything other than entertainment (and maybe, occasionally, accidentally, advice), and he doesn't bag on his commenters, even the stupid ones.

I'm not saying Snark doesn't occasionally dispense useful advice. She does. But I can tell you that she would never be my agent.

* I did not take high school French. Can you tell?

here's the new plan

It's funny that Sex Scenes commented about 'flexibility' on my last entry because I have recently decided to be very flexible and attempt a project where I'm writing for a specific audience and away from my usual style.

I'm probably an exception to most of the authors around here in that I don't have a couple finished novels kicking around in the back of my desk. Up 'til now I've written only short stories. I have some really cool ideas for longer stuff, but they're of course all very elaborate, stylized, tightly-structured things. I like to write this kind of thing, but it takes a long time. And not everybody likes it.

Realizing that my career in Information Technology is less than fulfilling and wanting more than ever to make a break for it, I've decided to try and quickly crank out a novel. To make it fast to write and attractive to publishers, I've decided that it should be fun, pulpy and... that it should appeal to teenagers. Sorry, 'young adults'. I honestly had in my idea that I would really like to do something that would make a great comic book, like 'Runaways', with an ensemble cast of kids who have special powers.

So I kind of let that stew in my head for a while. Of course teenager superheroes have been done. So have teenager werewolves and teenage vampires. I wasn't sure if there was anything new I could bring to the table.

And then...

I had a great idea.

Seriously, this is cool. I wish I could tell you about it. But maybe you'll see it for yourself before very long.

Anyways, I'm very excited. Right now I'm trying to sketch out the cast of characters. I think that knowing who your main characters are going into the novel is important. I'll be doing a plot outline too. I don't really "write from the hip" or whatever, I like to know where I'm going. Hopefully that will go quickly though, because I think plot twists for this concept practically write themselves.

So that's the plan at the moment. I'll let you know how it progresses. Stay tuned.