Going Slow

New blog post! I know it's been a while, but it's been a lot less newsworthy year than last year. I'm sorry to the few fans I have for my silence.

So, what's up, you ask? Writing. The difference this year is that almost none of it is in service to one project. I've had bursts of creativity all year that lead to very productive outpourings of story content, but never on the same story, and never on any of the projects that I feel are the most important to complete. All of my ideas for more mainstream TG novels are percolating. The sequels to "Alien Body Suit: Under Her Skin" are still plotted and outlined but not started. (OK, maybe part of the first chapter of ABS:IM has been worked on, but that's it.) There's a story for a Topside Press collection that has a deadline of December 1st that is only half written.

What I have been working on are two 100+ page stories that are only getting warmed up. One starts off in a way that reads like standard TG transformation fiction but evolves into a family drama. The other has a similar hook at the beginning that's becoming an identity crisis for the main character. I've also worked on maybe a dozen other stories that are 20 - 50 pages long with a variety of themes and transformation methods.

It's very frustrating professionally to find myself wanting to play instead of doing the work that's needed to move my career forward. In terms of pages written, this might actually be my most productive year ever. In terms of projects completed, it's among my worst. The only real silver lining I can see is that if these longer works ever get put up on Amazon, the large page counts will mean more pages read and more revenue for me. I'm also hoping that a longer work at a reasonable price will result in more direct purchases. All of that will - I hope - put me closer to being financially independent as an author.

That's the real goal: to make enough per month to quit my day job. Once I'm my own boss, I'll have an extra forty hours a week to write. Writing at a rate of about a page an hour, that's about 160 pages a month. More if you figure in an extra five hours a week saved by eliminating my commute (20 extra pages a month) and that I'm likely to eat and write at the same time through my lunch (5 hours a week, 20 pages a month). That's a full length novel every three months figuring in editing and rewriting of drafts. Four novels a year. At shorter lengths, that would be two stories a month, or twenty-four stories a year. With those kinds of numbers, I might actually have a body of work I could be proud of before I'm ready to retire.

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.

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.

That Crazy Space

The whole self-publishing of ABS through Lulu is going smashingly ... as in I want to smash my computer to bits! (Extra points if you get the geek pun in that statement.)

Here's the glitch. Lulu is converting my Word documents as part of the publication process, so that part is fine. The problem is that the source document added a space at the top of each page at the beginning of the first line. This happened when I added page numbers, and can be easily fixed by removing the page numbers. Now, I am using an older version of Word (97, to be exact), but this is a real pain. Page numbers are kind of important.

So at some point this week, I will be downloading OpenOffice. Let's hope that lets me fix these annoying formatting issues so that I can focus on doing a final round of editing and purchase a proof copy!

Midnight Oil

Not last night but the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers .... ha ha. No. What I was really going to say was that I got home from Oswego Harborfest at one in the morning and ended up writing until 4:30AM. I was very, very tired after that.

On an upside, ABS - the acronym I'm using in place of my current project's title - is done. More precisely, the added chapter / section I wanted to write to flesh it out is done. I think the new section makes the ending seem less abrupt.

Now to decide what to do with it. Reluctant Press? TG Comics? Self-publish? I can't decide.

As much as I would like to support RP, they seem to be doing well without my help. Femur has big plans for TG Comics and I would like to support that. On the other hand, a straight story doesn't really fit in at TG Comics. As for self-publishing, I worry that I won't do well at all. I suppose the only way to find out for sure will be to try.