Last week was a long, boring week. It seems that I’m not writing much, if at all. I’ve been thinking about doing NaNo, but it depends on when Grimaulkin Tempted gets back from the editor. I can turn it around usually in two weeks, so that’s not a problem. The problem is I have no idea what to write for NaNo.
I looked over War Mage and I have 8K words there. Earth, I have 3K. The other thought is to get Earth finished for NaNo, since that’s what’s next on the publishing agenda.
War Mage is slated for May 2018, but War Mage is like pulling teeth. I don’t want to offend anyone in the armed forces with the book, being that I’m coming at it from a non-combatant’s point of view. It’s not like I didn’t do any research on war–I’ve read four books on the Afghan war and two on Iraq. But I do admit it’s nothing like being in combat, and I somehow have to lie about that when I write. I’ve been told that the first scene of Homecoming was very realistic, so I might be able to pull it off. It’s the little things, the slang, the acronyms, the military language that I don’t know. My target audience for War Mage is people who are interested in the military but want a fantasy element to it. Kind of like John Scalzi but with fantasy instead of sci-fi.
Something–the muses, whatever–wants me to try something else. Memoir, perhaps, because memoir seems to sell well in this neck of the woods. The story in the anthology is based on a story my great-uncle told me about when he lived during Prohibition. (By the way, my story is first in the anthology, a place of honor, as I understand it.) I want to get away from the magic for a little while, not because I’m sick of it, but because I know it all too well. The memoir I have in mind is in three parts: Cancer, Death, and Autism. The title is Torn Asunder. Maybe I’ll do it. I know NaNo is for fiction, but I want to do something that is lucrative. I don’t know if I have enough stuff to write it, and if I want to bare my soul yet (some people involved aren’t dead yet). But it could be only for me. And my posterity. I do want to get it down before I die, and the way things are going, I have about six years left.
Okay, so I amend my first statement. I have a few options. We’ll just have to see what I end up with in the next two weeks.
In the meantime, I’m going to try and write at least once a week on my writing blog. It might not always have to do with the game, even though I’m back to playing it again. I have too many characters in that game to keep track of now! And I keep making more! I’m addicted and need to stop. But I’ll try and write a short story once a week. I read a quote that if you write a short story every week, there’s no way you can write a bad short story 52 times in a row. So somewhere there’s going to be a diamond out of all that crap I spew out.
