Christmas Is Coming Early

Within the next day or so, I'll be publishing my next story, a Christmas story, for FREE.

The plan is to submit it tomorrow morning so that it will be published by the time I get home from work. Once it's up, I can put on the promotion to make it FREE (yes, FREE) from Black Friday through this coming Sunday (11/28/14 - 11/30/14). So, be warned. It will be up for $5.95 as soon as tomorrow night, in case you really, really can't wait. Those that are patient enough to wait for Friday can get it for FREE. I think I may have mentioned that once or twice already.

I'd prefer to wait until Thursday to post, then add the promo Thursday night for the next morning to minimize the chance that someone buys it at full cost by mistake. With the holiday, though, that doesn't seem like the wisest course of action. It also give me less time to post notices on TG Comics and Fictionmania to let people know it's up for FREE for the weekend.

After that, I intend to put up a holiday countdown promotion so that the story will scale up in price as the holiday approaches. That's not exactly ideal, but as long as I've committed to distributing through Amazon, these are the tools I have to work with.

One last thing. I do not approve of retailers cutting into the Thanksgiving holiday by starting their Black Friday sales on Thursday. So, no free story until Friday. Them's the breaks, folks.

"Busted!"

Oh, Femur. I know that great minds think alike and all, but I'm sad to lose the title for one of my favorite story concepts.

Femur's "Busted" (no exclamation point) is a great Premium offering from TG Comics. Femur did the story and Gluebubble did the art. It has a great future-retro feel that makes for a fun read. While I wouldn't call the ending a "twist," it certainly was unexpected. All in all a great read and well worth the money to purchase access, in my opinion.

But ... that was MY title!!!  ;-)  I have had a story idea that's partially written for a number of years with this title. How long? I did a Fictionmania search before opening the file on my hard drive, amazed that no one had written a story with that title yet. Now there are two. The oldest of them is from 2003. That should give you an idea of how long some of my ideas take to bring to fruition.

If you think I'm going to just delete the story, don't despair. While I may have to rename this story, I like it too much to just throw it out. It will see the light of day eventually.

But do you see now why I'm so tight lipped about my story names?!? It's way too easy to lose a good idea to another author. It's not like you can own a name either. Sometimes the best way to keep something from being used by other people is to keep it secret. And the best way to keep a secret? Simple: DON'T TELL ANYONE.

Story Recommendation: "Just Pretending" by Varian Milagro

I don't normally recommend other author's stories. In fact, this may be a first. However, I'm recommending "Just Pretending"  by Varian Milagro over at Fictionmania. You can my review of the story at the site, but it has spoilers. I suggest you just take my word and go check it out.

As a time saver, here's the story's blurb from FM:

"A poorly worded wish on a birthday candle bought at Spells R Us turns Keith into Kaylee. Now, except Keith and his best friend Seth, everyone remembers him as always being Kaylee. Keith has no clue how to be a girl and the store has vanished. Can Keith fake it long enough until he finds the store again?"

Sometimes a blurb makes a story seem more interesting than it actually is. In this case, it doesn't really do the story justice. The friendship is deep and believable. While the physical transformation is near instantaneous, the more gradual transformation of young man into young woman is far more subtle. I would go so far as to state that it is one of the best mental transformation stories I've read in a long time. Maybe ever.

Yes, it really is that good.

What are you still doing here? Stop reading my dumb blog and go check out the story!

Wanted: Writing Agent

I've got a few finished stories that I'm not sure what to do with at this point. I really wish I had a test reader that I could trust to give me feedback on my work. One of them for sure is bound for Fictionmania and TGStorytime. I've considered self-publishing a couple of them. Really kind of lost and frustrated.

All my writing lately is the literary equivalent of puttering in the garage. Things happen, progress is made, but nothing really gets done.

I need a like minded individual to bounce ideas off of. Like an agent. Someone that could say, "Hey, this story is really good. Don't give it away for free. This one's OK, but don't charge for it. And this one? Burn it; it's horrible."

Alien Body Suit: Under Her Skin

EDITORIAL UPDATE AS OF 3/23/13 AT 11:51PM: IF YOU'RE READING THIS POST, YOU SHOULD READ MY MOST RECENT POST, "YOU KNOW." JUST SO, UM, YOU KNOW. WHICH YOU WILL IF YOU READ THAT POST.

It's up! Alien Body Suit: Under Her Skin is now for sale for $9.95 on the TG Comics website. It's my second story to be illustrated and published there, but the first to be a Premium. In fact, it's the first premium illustrated story to be put up for sale on that website. I'm excited and a little scared to see how it will be received. If it doesn't do well for Femur - the webmaster, publisher and all around guru at TG Comics - it may close a door for other authors. I hope that doesn't happen.

TG Comics is virtually unique on the Internet, and that is a damn hard thing to do. I don't think the average visitor to the site really gets how much time, effort and money Femur spends on the site. The process of getting my story published there has given me a glimpse behind that curtain.

I think everybody knows the site is Femur's love song to the genre. I don't think everybody gets the depth of that commitment. The TG fiction community owes him a huge Thank You. Like Mindy Rich with Fictionmania (for stories), or Mako and Ray with the now defunct "Siren Song" website (for video), Femur's TG Comics website is the gold standard for sequential and illustrated TG fiction. I could not be more proud to have my work for sale there.

On a less profound, more whimsical note, can you see now why I am so coy about titles? If I had told people that ABS stood for Alien Body Suit, the content and direction of the story would have been too obvious, to the point of being a spoiler. Clearly the sequels - ABS:IM and ABS:WLW - are stories in the Alien Body Suit trilogy. (As a side note, it's "body suit" and not "bodysuit" due specifically to how the device is first seen / precieved in the story. You can read that part of the story for free in the preview that's up at TG Comics.) Those titles are guess-able if you know my writing well enough. Even so, I don't like to show my cards until I lay down my hand. Like the plot of those sequels ... well, read and see.

But start by reading Alien Body Suit: Under Her Skin. The test readers all loved it. I think you will too.

Receeding Horizon

My publisher for ABS:UHS has given me feedback from three test readers. Those people know who they are, so I won't embarrass them by naming them here. The feedback has been very positive. In my opinion, even the negative feedback was because the reader was so invested in the characters, the outcome bummed them out. (I think the term "a real downer" was used.) The two others had really nice, wonderful things to say, so it looks like we're one step closer to publication.

Me? I'm past ready for it. I've been procrastinating on starting the sequels. Seeing ABS:UHS up online will, I think, give me the nudge I need so at least start writing the 2nd and 3rd parts. Scary to think that will put the story as a whole around 300 pages. (With illustrations, that might make it 600+ pages.) Wow. That's dangerously close to novel length. I'm running out of excuses to write an actual novel.

Speaking of procrastinating, I've been working on MCN. I'm past the transformation scene and into the guts of the story, which is all about dealing with the fallout for both of the main characters. Let's hope I can keep it up. Often, I find it difficult to write once I'm past that point. I lose interest and the story languishes half-formed on my hard drive.

In other procrastination news, I've finished another story that I haven't mentioned here yet. It's short and it's very sexual, so I may put it up on Fictionmania or TG Storytime soon. Still not sure on that one. Like the ABS series, this one has more than one part. They're short enough that I may put off releasing them until at least the next one is done. As always, I don't like spoilers, but I will say that this series deals a little bit with a Man Into Object theme, which is new for me. Fun, but new.

Well, at least the object is new. I did make my script for The Bra public over at the TG Comics forum.

Untitled

I don't think I've mentioned this before, so let me tell you now: I hate ... HATE ... using titles that other authors have used before. So, I have a story that I play with now and again that has a working title of "Busted!"

Not anymore, though. I just did a Fictionmania search and discovered a bunch of stories that use some variant of "Busted" as a title. Now I have to search my brain and come up with a new title that's clever  enough to suit me and still matches the narrative of the story.

Damn it.

A Brand New Bag

I just read Morpheus' latest story, "Inexplicable," over at Fictionmania. It took a little effort to get into, but was a great read once I did.

What struck me most about it is that unlike many TG authors, he doesn't lean on sex as a plot crutch. In TG, you can't ever really get away from the sex 100%, but the quality writers always seem to be more about the characters and the situations than they are about the X rated stuff.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I think that we might be on the cusp of a change in the genre. Up until now, there has been a lot of focus on sex. More and more, I see the best talents in TG writing either walking away from it as unsatisfying, or writing less for the audience and more to please themselves on a less base level. I think we might be approaching the same moment Science Fiction writing reached in the mid 20th century, where a Rubicon is crossed, leaving our pulp past behind us. On the other shore is a bright future where the craft of writing and the quality of the story are more important than the necessity of including erotic content.

I think the audience is both listening and ready.

Project Progress

My sometimes mentioned project - ABS - has a new name, and so it gains a new moniker ... ABS:UHS. What does that gobbledy-gook stand for? That's under wraps for now.

Where to start? I guess from the beginning.

ABS has been done for a while now. Not long after I finished writing it, I finished two additional stories, F_D, which does not stand for what you think it does and MM. I'm also a few pages from finishing a fourth story, and I have an outline done for a fifth story. Outlines, by the way, are Sara Speak for, "Oh yeah, that one's getting finished for sure."

My original intention was to publish with Reluctant Press. But ... I think I've mentioned before that I'm no longer as taken with them as I once was. I then decided to self-publish through Lulu. As mentioned back in 2009, that did not go well. Around the same time, I was looking for an illustrator to do a cover image and a few interior illustrations to accompany the story.

What came next suprised me a lot: an offer to illustrate my story, to publish me, and like Lulu, to pay me per sale ... with a 50-50 split. I jumped at the offer. Also, MM - a story I had considered giving away at Fictionmania - would also get illustrated and given away as a way to drum up sales for ABS. I was really excited by the prospects, and kind of sat back and did nothing for a good long while.

Fast forward about a year and a half and here I am, still waiting. As if what had happened before wasn't great enough, the new publisher contacted me and apologized for the delay, and offered to hire an illustrator out of their own pocket to do illustrations. But, instead of the 3 - 4 that I had been thinking of originally, they want to do 100.

Yes, you read that right: 100.

So again, I jumped at the offer. An artist agreed to do the work. E-mails were traded. Illustrations were described. Baseline images were agreed upon. In genereal, progress has been made. I've even started to see actual illustrations. Right now, I'm frustrated with the process, but I've got to say, it's good to be making forward progress with my art, even if most of the work is being done for me by another person at this point.

Ode to FictionMania

FictionMania is down. It has been down for months.

I trust that it will return at some point in the near future. Hopefully within the next five seconds or so. You see, until it was gone, I did not realize how important this icon of TG fiction was. Don't get me wrong, I knew it was huge. It was - and is, even in its absence - the 800 pound gorilla of TG fiction. Be sure to imagine the gorilla in a dress, of course.

I was already a big reader and a wannabe writer before I found the site back in the late 1990's. I turned to it for inspiration. I would read each story with an eye for its strengths and weaknesses, which helped me grow as a writer. Some stories infuriated me by mingling an intriguing concept with poor form. Some were exceptionally well writen, yet managed to bore me to tears. Other stories made me scratch my head, wondering why I liked them so much when they were so badly written. In each story, I found something that I could learn from, even if it was an example of what clearly didn't work. When I was especially lucky, an author would "wow" me with both concept and execution. Morpheus, for one, seems to have endless depths of creativity and talent on which to draw.

Yes, it will return. Sure, there are other sites with stories to view in the meantime. I know I should be writing my own fiction rather than weeping in my blog, but somehow, this glaring absence has left a hole in my sense of community.

Come back soon, dear friend.