Very nice. Definitely publishable.
My secondary world romcom The Warbearās Wife is available in the Witches, Warriors, and Wyverns anthology.
Congrats! I know Tom Gondolfi, heās a good guy, and his anthologies are top notch.
Thanks. He does seem like a good guy. I hope he does well with the anthology.
By the way, I think I completely forgot to announce my noir-romantic urban fantasy novella The Demons of Wall Street will be out in March from Mirror World Publishing. Theyāve already acquired the sequel to be released in the fall, and Iām very excited to have started my first series.
Blurb:
Nora Simeon hates demons. But as an investigator for the secretive Commission, the organization that covertly regulates financial sorcery in New York City, she has to deal with the monstrosities a lot more than sheād like. Her latest case has her on the track of a rogue demon, escaped from magical slavery as an analyst for a leading investment bank.
On the demonās trail, Nora crosses paths with a beautiful young man named Eyre. Heās too pretty and complaisant to be human, and too kind and loving to be a demon in human form, but what else could he be? Together the unlikely pair become embroiled in the secret corruption at the heart of the financial industry. But before Nora can untangle a twisted skein of sorcerous murder and slavery, she has to untangle her feelings for Eyre. And before she can do that, she has to find out who and what he really is.
I am, as ever, in awe of some peopleās output in this thread. Iām the slowest writer in history.
Checking in with all of the writers. Whoās using quarantine time to crank out some words? Any new publication news from anyone?
Iām supposed to write 1,700 words biweekly for work, so that will be fun.
I have a story I like quite a bit coming out next month in Zooscape. Riding Through the Desert is a romantic post-apocalyptic weird-western cosmic horror story. My first novelette sale, which means I have sold something now at every length from drabble to novel. Yes, Iām afraid it was inspired by the 70s America song.
Iām 30,000 words into a novella atm, but unfortunately I suspect it will wind up exceeding 40k and Iāll have to add more plot or stitch it together with a sequel to make a novel. I also have no idea what happens next at this juncture, but hopefully something will occur to me soonā¦ Iām pretty sure it will require a lot of revision.
I wish you success with the novelette, but Horse with No Name is one of those songs that makes me immediately punch the radio button to switch to another station. Yeesh!
Ha! And really it is a very weak little song.
Iām finishing up my new book, the first I will have completed in over a year due to stuff and things. Itās about 80K and the elevator pitch for Forged in the Fires of Heaven is: A squad of Marines has been abducted by visitors from another worlds, and thatās bad news for the aliens.
I am very unhappy about my writing. I just canāt āseeā [whatās wrong] despite being able to spot mistakes in other peopleās writing pretty easily.
Sounds like a movie waiting to be made!
Iām ready for Netflix to show up at my house with a wheelbarrow full of money.
Anyone heard of writers.work? Is it a good platform?
My writing generally sucks, but thatās because i usually write stream of consciousness but also because iām really bad at composition. Like iāll be thinking about a sentence and it sounds great but by the time pen is to paper so to speak, itās twice as wordy and has lost the character i wanted.
Iāve also found that my mind has to be in the āzoneā for my writing to not be pretty generically bad.
But i have written things that i think are good, even if itās just a paragraph or some sentences that are otherwise swimming in the mediocrity seas.
One thing to do is spend as much time editing and revising. TBH i probably spend about 3/4 of the writing time just editing and rewriting. The problem with editing is that if iām not careful I end up writing hundreds of words of new content and now itās just a layered onion full of bad and good writing that never finishes and never fully improves.
Yeah, āpruningā is its own mode. With some difficulty, I was able to train myself to stay in it for 30+ minutes at a time, thanks to a college professor who was very aggressive about economy in language. Itās worth it.
Thereās an approach to writing that suggests write and do little editing. Just move on to the next thing.
The best way I found to improve my editing skills was to sign up for a writing group that doesnāt evaluate its members, but has a reasonable requirement for participation (something like making you comment on at least four pieces per month). You end up going through a lot of bad writing. To be more efficient, I would find, say, the top five things that could be done to improve the piece, then call it done. It actually honed my ability to zero in on what was most critical in my own first drafts. I had always tried to get a piece perfect when I put on my editor hat. Now I just try to find the top five things. Sometimes you fix those five things and itās a whole new story (which means that if I had worked on it more when it was a draft, I might never have found the draft in my hand right now).