Tag Archives: novella

If the sun never rises: Friday Update

02 Friday Feb 2024

Posted by in A Few Thoughts, Novels, Poetry, Series, Writing

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Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

News:

After the polar vortex dipped down here to blister my toes with chilblains, we slipped into a false spring. It’s been warm, but also cloudy and rainy. I like cloudy and rainy, but after a while, missing the sun disrupts the sense of day rising and night falling. The temperature is beautiful (even a little warmer than I prefer) and doesn’t look like we’ll get a big winter front for a while (if at all), but there are a lot of clouds in the forecast. Makes me drowsy.

There’s no immediate news really, although I can tease that I received another great blurb and did my first podcast interview for Question Not My Salt this week. First podcast interview ever, actually.

If you missed it, I put out the Puppeteer (Thorns 4) playlist. You can find all the book playlists under the Thorns series header above. The links are under each book listing.

Works in Progress:

I finished the second edit of erotic horror novella A Woman Alone and brought it down to under 40K words, which was the goal. Since January submission calls ended and February calls opened up, I submitted that, plus a novelette and a few more short stories. I also finished what might be my last poems for the Autumn section of my seasonal poetry collection. Now I just have to write for Spring.

On January 31st, I felt weird starting something new right at the end of the month, and I didn’t have any more small projects to fuss with, so I took the day off to binge-watch Buffy, Angel, and The Mentalist and feel sorry for myself because I’m still struggling with leg pain. Sometimes you just need to wallow. I don’t really take days off and often downplay my own work as actual work—even though I put in full effort seven days a week—because I don’t receive commensurate compensation. But rest will occasionally force itself upon you

Wallowing over, I started on Silver & Steel (Meridian 7) yesterday, and it started pretty strong. I broke from my usual style for the series and decided to do it in first-person present tense. Whether I finish it mid-February or not, that’s when I’ll clean up my resume and start putting out job applications. Hopefully, winter doesn’t decide to come back with an icy vengeance at that point. It did when I started my last job nine years ago.

Books I’m Reading:

IT by Stephen King
Midnight Blue-Light Special by Seanan McGuire
Ending in Ashes by Rebecca Jones-Howe

Things I’m Listening To:

Sara Bareilles
Eurielle
Timber Timbre
Agnes Obel
Tina Guo

Things I’m Watching:

Bullet Train
Saltburn
Taken 2
Buffy the Vampire Slayer series (watchalong)
Angel series (watchalong)
CSI series
The Mentalist series
Abbott Elementary series
Helix series
All Creatures Great and Small series
Murder, She Wrote series

Poem of the Week:

save your vitriol for someone
who wouldn’t eat your soul
instead of a sandwich
if it satisfied their hunger
more efficiently

Am I ill?

09 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in Writing

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I started a pure horror story near the end of February (I classify NOCTURNE as horror, but it has a serious supernatural fantasy vibe in addition to the horror elements). I wrote the first ten thousand words last year, back when I had downtime at work to longhand (what is downtime?). I started out last month with transcription, then tackled new words. That’s difficult for me to do, come back to an old project, but this one hasn’t been hard to sink into. I guess it’s stayed on my mind all this time.

Any problems I’ve had have been because dayjob has been going through a months-long transition, and that’s required a near manic level of energy from me, but also more time than I like giving. I’m a perfectionist and pathologically terrified of disapproval, so I do what I do and don’t have enough time or energy to write as much as I’d like. Still doing it, though. Because when I don’t, my mental health plummets to dangerous places.

How strange that such a dark, bleak, sad story that I developed during the surfacing  fatalism after the last election would become a haven of sorts. So it’s moving more slowly than I’d like, but it’s moving.

I’ve hit roughly twenty-eight thousand words on the manuscript so far. And based on my outline and rough word goal of sixty thousand words, I’m about halfway through. Now, usually I give myself a word goal, then end up twenty thousand words or more above it. I’m notoriously terrible at figuring out how long things take or, in the case of novels, how long they’re going to be, even when I adjust for knowing how terrible I am at it.

But for DEEP DOWN (working title), I’m looking at fifty to sixty thousand words of a novel. As planned. Before edits. I’m actually writing a short novel, possibly a *gasp* novella.

You have to understand, in addition to being terrible at gauging how long things take, I really tend toward longer novels. I think I average around 120,000 words. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I’m really good at cutting my starting word count, paring a novel to its necessary words. That 120K novel was probably 140-150K to start out with. THORNS started out at a whopping 195K and ended up 155K.

A fifty-thousand-word novel is unthinkable to me. I’m literally looking at that word count and wondering whether something’s wrong with me. Or the story.

But I think it’s because it’s a single story line, no subplots, and a spare cast. I’m usually working with a more complex plot and multiple characters whose arcs need tending. DEEP DOWN has a very simple premise. A lot of good horror is minimalistic, and that’s what I wanted to try here.

I guess it’s working.

It’s still weird.