Happy New Year!

I'm writing this in 2019. Have a happy and fulfilling New Year, everyone!

First of all, my personal history in The Hypnotician was just updated this morning.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

My blog on Dreamwidth has also been updated, with a New Year's message.

And lastly, I will be starting this new year writing - mostly short verbal scripts for The Hypnotician, but also MC stories for Literotica and the Erotic Mind Control Story Archive and perhaps some fanfic for Archive Of Our Own.

I plan on being busy with writing this year.

2013 12 01

Yesterday, the last day of November 2013, was a fantastic day.

But not for me. For the hundred thousand people who finally signed the WOW petition, which means that it will have to be debated in Parliament.

The War On Welfare e-petition has been going on for months, and I've been promoting it much of that time. Watching it reach the magic 100k felt like watching a piece of history.

Yesterday was also the final day of NaNoWriMo 2013 - a contest I did not complete. It could not have been done, what with my gall bladder surgery knocking my creativity for six and all. Still, let's hope for next year now.

Though I'm not going to sit and wait for next year - I'm determined to write The Empty Shadow now, and make a solid go out of it so I can get it finished before Camp NaNoWriMo next year. It'll give me the opportunity to exercise my creativity to bring it back up to speed, and it'll give me something to do during Christmas and the New Year when I'll be sat on my own for what could be hours at a time.

I have no plans for the evenings of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or New Year's Eve. I never make plans for those evenings. Ever. My folks might go out for the night; my sisters might have some do to attend, with their partners - but I have nobody on this side of the pond, not even to keep me company on those nights. So there will be writing, because I really won't have anything else to do.

And so we reach the final month of 2013. Happy World AIDS Day, folks.

Writing on The Empty Shadow resumes on Monday. Also resuming on Monday - my life. No heave lifting; but that does not mean that I must be forced to stay in the flat all the time. The Doctor says I should go out and about for a bit, and there'll be a checkup later this month with the surgeon to determine whether I can get a clean bill of health and return to volunteer duties.

Between now and then ... you guessed it. I will be writing. A lot, I hope.

Short Stories - Two Lessons I Have Learned

The two things you need to remember about writing short stories:-

- They have to be self-contained; nothing has to refer to an outside story. If your guy has superpowers, reveal them early or show him resolving the problems without them; if there is a gun, it belongs to that Russian guy from Star Trek and it has to be fired at least once before the end of the story.

- Closures all around. Whatever happens in the story ends in the story. It might be canon, but there has to be a sense of normalisation at the end. You don't get to write a short story whose ending leaves open a loose thread which opens in another short story or even main sequence novel. If there is a loose end, it dies when the story ends and it is referred to never again, save in discussions at author panels at conventions or down the pub.

Of course, now I've outlined these two cardinal rules which I will never break ... I'll try to break them good and hard across the knee some time.

Short Stories

Since I joined the Fang Song Fantasy Writers' Club in Chester Library, I've written a number of short fantasy stories from at least two settings.

"Sanna's Sentence" and "Scarred" are set in the world of my novel, The Silver Touch. In another world, "Nobody's Perfect" and "The Treasure of Ages" feature the protagonists Arven - an elf - and Inkblot - a walking shadow, summoned from a plane of smoke and shade.

Meanwhile, I still have "Island of Stars," my second Paleborn story, sequel to "Inheritance," a short story I wrote a few years ago.

"Let me take you to the days of high adventure ..."

Short Stories

I'm writing the first of a series of short stories spinning off from The Silver Touch, The Gilded Saidara and The Shadowed Art.

The background is that I have become involved with a fantasy writers' club in Chester, and I have a set exercise each month to follow. This month's theme is "Shapeshifters."

I swore that I would write not one, but three, fantasy stories around that theme. One would be a sequel to last month's short story entry "Nobody's Perfect," featuring Inkblot from that story; another, an original fantasy not connected to any setting; and then, there is "Increments," this story - tied intimately to the setting of The Silver Touch, and featuring settings, backdrops, characters and props from that novel.

In a way, "Increments" could easily be your gateway into this world. But it won't be the only gateway.

As long as there are assignments for this club, there might well be a steady stream of short stories like these. And I can happily turn them all into an anthology, or tack them to the end of a novel-length story. I might even consider writing a novel and adding at least one short story to the end, as a sort of "appendix."

Getting Published Again

Some time ago, I submitted an article to Mongoose for publication in their magazine Signs & Portents. The article, titled Tales of The Black Freighter, was originally intended as a reboot of the Traveller TOS short adventure Annic Nova, where an alien derelict ship poses a mystery to space adventurers.

Anyway, things went south for Signs & Portents. Last year, the final issue of Signs & Portents rolled out, and basically the adventure never made it into print - Mongoose went with a reboot of Annic Nova, virtually verbatim from Marc W Miller's original adventure.

So today, I've submitted The Tale of The Black Freighter, with a slight change of title and a few typos corrected, to Freelance Traveller instead.

I already have one article in the editor's hands, awaiting release as a possible free Special Supplement when he comes up with his special Psionics issue. I figured that I might as well enjoy sending him further articles for his magazine.

I might not make any money out of this - but if it means me getting published again, even in a free mag, I have to go for it. As long as my list of credits starts getting longer.

2013 04 25 Camp NaNoWriMo Winner

I surpassed 50000 words in my novel, The Shadowed Art, on 2013 04 25, with minutes to spare. Having verified the word count on the official Camp NaNoWriMo page, I noticed the following two chamges on my site.

I also came up with (albeit minimal) covers for the three novels I have written for the setting so far. These are, in order:-

The Silver Touch
(completed 2012 10 14)

The Gilded Saidara
(completed 2012 11 21)

The Shadowed Art
(completed 2013 04 25)

The official celebrations can now begin. I will accept your adulation now. :)

Allies And Enemies

A good point someone once made - I can't remember the name, may the gods forgive me - was this.

In writing your antagonists, never make them allies until you need them to be allies.

And never make them enemies until you need them to be enemies.

That is probably one of the most useful pieces of advice I have ever been given. It doesn't affect the motivations or motives of the antagonists when encountered, but like everything human it leaves plenty of scope for flexibility and openness in one's dealings with antagonists in fiction, or with non-player characters in tabletop fantasy roleplaying adventures.

Inspirations

In this blog, I talk about mathematics, writing, intelligence and genius - and why the general public should tolerate them more.

today, writing. And why a writer should keep a small pool of outstanding finished work to send to publishers, as well as a collection of works in progress.

I have recently begun to see my works in publication in some magazines. Small stuff, at first; but then I do hope for a larger commission some time, which will garner more attention and lead to something big, such as a successful submission of a novel.

If you know that the magazine comes out regularly, you'll also become aware that the editor probably has his hands full on a monthly basis just getting articles to fill that mag each week. Editors want variety, substance and brevity in the articles they receive, because that means circulation and a readership kept fresh and wanting more. It doesn't pay to go stale in the market.

The occasional submission works just fine: but every editor just desperately wants somebody who will turn out good quality work, on time and to word count. Every time. Those who have a proven track record of reliability and quality, say over a three, four or six month period, they offer the job of columnist to. And that can lead to a much more lucrative pay check at the end of the month, providing you can keep up the pace.

And here we come to the crux of this post: building up your own pool of works in progress.

Let's say you have a fraught month one time. You have more than your share of calamity and people stressing you out from all angles. This month, you won't have time to write anything good for the editor - or indeed, write very much at all.

Imagine the joy of having an article in a pool, maybe one you wrote three weeks ago so it feels fresh and topical, or maybe a more solid one you wrote earlier, with a timeless quality that affirms the magazine's mission. Rather than try and write more than a bare bones outline for the article this month, send the editor the one from the pool. Hopefully, it will pass muster for this month.

If it does, good. You just earned more than just the cash you get from writing: you earn yourself breathing room for week or two, long enough for you to resolve your problems and put pen back to paper, or maybe hit the keys.

Treat your pool of WIP as a sustainable forest. For every one tree you harvest and send off to the lumber yard, plant two. Keep it going until you have a decent body of articles in reserve. They will serve as your bread and butter, and give you the free time to concentrate for a few weeks on the projects you want to work on.

Keep variety in mind when writing, too. One day the editor might desperately want something relating to a new product just out on the market. If you have something that sounds or feels like the kind of item he or she wants, you can dig it out, look at it to see what kinds of tweaks it will need to bring it into line with the new product, maybe get some sort of guidelines from the new product's manufacturer or the book's author, and send that off to the editor. You'll already have done all the quantity work: you only need to edit to get the quality right.

If nothing else, at least with a pool of work you can pick and choose what you send off to the editors, and what you write and send to other editors as "showpiece" writing. As long as you realise that some months, you have no choice but to replenish that pool of articles, setting aside your more pleasant work and getting down to the grind, just to keep the volume of articles sustainably high, you ought to do all right.