Plugging Away

It has been a very productive week for my writing. I was late crew at my day job all week long, and had quite a few short days. As such, I was able to get thousands of words written on the two works I've been plugging away at: Sherpa Holmes, and Airship Follies. Both are Steampunk. Sherpa is a standalone alternate history work that has almost reached novella length (and will by the time I am done with it). Not quite sure how long Airship will go--it started off as a short-short and ballooned on me. That one is set in my Aeropæia world, the same as Tunk (from Will Write SciFi for Food, Too).

I had two major storyline problems I dealt with in Sherpa yesterday. Fixed them both, but created a new continuity problem that needs to be dealt with. Even with that, I still managed to get over 2,000 words written on it. I don't remember how many words I managed to get written on Airship during the past week--it was a case of 200 here, 700 there. I believe, when totaled up, it came to more or less an additional 2,000 words on that piece as well.

I intended to write more today, but after I made that scrumptious lunch (spaghetti carbonara) I had a severe case of the doldrums. But the time I worked past that, it as time to start dinner. We grilled some moist chicken out on the grill, and we had that plus some fancy cheeses my son made a platter out of. Again, writing was not to happen.

I probably should be working on either of the stories now--and yet, here I am, playing with my blog. Meh.

No, I don't see any productive writing happening tonight. I see a shower, and the reading of a good book happening. With that said, I'll leave you with a link to one of my cats. I caught her in that cat trap she's hanging out of.

Cat-trap

Coupon!

Been thinking of checking out Will Write SciFi For Food, Too but didn't want to spend $1.99?  Well, then--I have some good news for you!  In celebration of the one year anniversary of WWSFFF1 I'm offering a 50% coupon for it on Smashwords.  Just use coupon code, PC67U.  (Coupon is good for one week.)

Book Split

I've come to a decision about including the Steampunk story Sherpa Holmes in my upcoming Will Write SciFi For Food, Too.

It ain't a-gonna happen.  There are a couple reasons behind this.

First, with how much I have already written on the piece, plus the copious notes I have yet to incorporate into the story, it is going to hit novella length, if not full novel length.

Second, the piece deals with some fairly rough topics--among them warfare, war crimes, civilian casualties, and generally man's inhumanity against others.  It has already pushed past the limits of the self-imposed PG rating I am trying to keep on WWSFFF2.

So briefly I will be putting Doctor Shalik Chandela-Holmes' story on a back burner while I break one of my other rough drafts out of the barn and bring it up to full RPM in order to finish off WWSFFF2 and get the book released.

Don't worry--her tale will not stay there very long.  She is a very headstrong woman with a lot to say.  She's already taken over the story.  No, I mean it.  She's writing it now.  I'm just along for the ride.

Shalom out.

End of the Year

Yep.  Been neglecting my blog again.  Between trying to get my next book out and my day job, I have not had much time for non-book writing.

Since this is the end of the year, I thought I'd take a break from my Steampunk story that is currently occupying my writing time, and play for a bit.

Let's toss out an idea--not one that I am going to fiddle with myself.  This is just a story starter.  Take it and run with it.  Just give me the favor of a shout out.

What if . . . when civilian/commercial space flight (like Virgin Galactic) does take off, they get around to the "dark" side of the moon (you know--the one facing away from the Earth) and they find the remains of an advanced civilization?

Would NASA/Gov't squash it?  "That's classified!"  They most likely would already know about it from our own flights to the moon and back.  Would they even allow civilian pace flight?  Or make it so improbable through over-regulating that we would have to sneak off planet for find something like this?  At what point would someone like Sir Richard Branson tell the US government to lump it?

What if it was still inhabited?  How could they possibly be living in vacuum?  Did they manage to mine water from beneath the surface?  What if they didn't need water or an atmosphere?

What if they didn't know about us until then?

What if their government did know about us, but was keeping us a secret from their civilian population, too?

What then?

On Writing a Novel

So there I was, flat on my arse, writing happily away . . .

*snort*

I wish.

I've found out that working on a novel vs working on a short story is a whole different ball of worms. I keep finding things in prior chapters that need tweaking. "Oh, I meant to say that right there."

I have to just leave what I've written in the past alone, or I'll never get this thing off the ground.

And now back to our regularly scheduled snarkiness.