New Year's Resolution 2014

I'm sitting at home waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square. At this time, as I always do, I'm looking forward to the new year. Here are my goals in no particular order:

1. Turn my outlines for the two sequels to "Alien Body Suit: Under Her Skin" into completed stories.
2. Publish / find a home for a number of the stories I've completed but not released. (TPF, TotTC, HG, and a trilogy of shorter stories in the same universe I don't think I've mentioned before: AH, INF, BU)
3. Finish the stories I have mostly - but not all the way - completed. (COT, TB, BaM, MAU: SEP)
4. Complete my outline and start work on my screenplay project: CS.
5. Set up a webpage as a home for the content / stories I intend to start self-publishing. It's past time for me to jump on the Amazon bandwagon.
6. Start work on the on one or both of the two book projects I've had in mind for a while now.
7. Make time to write. This resolution involves watching less TV, which is a huge, HUGE time suck for me.

There are a couple more minor goals, like how many pages a week I want to write, forming an LLC, getting illustrations done for my stories to be published and so forth, but the ones above are the biggies.

Another One Bites The Dust

I finished another story. Now what?

I had a week off this last week. As I often do, I used some of my extra free time to write. I banged out 28 pages to finish it off. Writing at an average pace of about one (1) page an hour or less, that's more than three days of full time work. The time flew by. I could do it again easily, because it's just too much fun to write. "T_ P_ F_" (TPF, from now on) is now sitting on my hard drive, needing revision, waiting to be polished to a gleaming shine before being published at ... I don't know where.

Like my other unpublished work (ABS:UHS), I will not be submitting it to Reluctant Press. I think I've outgrown them. It's less about them than it is about me wanting more control over the content I create. If I write something and it bombs, I want to know. If it succeeds wildly, I want to know. Most of all, I want to succeed or fail based on the merits (or lack thereof) of my own work.

To that end, ABS:UHS has been extensively illustrated (paid for by a third party) and will be published at some point in the future at a website that won't suprise anyone that follows my writing. As great as that is, I'm looking to publish independently for my next story. I have Lulu and Createspace (Amazon) accounts set up, but I'm not sure which I'll use. I'm leaning towards Createspace, as I think it will get more exposure if I use them. A friend of mine uses them with great personal success.

For now, I've got a several stories with finished outlines and enough pages to know I want to finish them. (C_ O_ T_, MAU:S_ E_ , T_ B_, TotTC:M_ V_) Before I worry about publishing, that's were I'm going to put my focus, starting with COT. Besides, TPF makes reference to a licensed character that needs to be edited out if I'm going to sell it.