Scheming into 2011 (Part Deux)

Back in January 2011, I posted this blog entry on my plans for the first half of 2011. They were, in summary:

– Submit Brutal Light to another publisher
– Submit True Places to another publisher
– Submit Onyx Fire to a publisher
– Outline my next novel (either Minions or the sequel to Brutal Light) and get started on writing it
– Write a new short story
– Rework an old short story into saleable form
– Submit my short story Fabulous Beasts to a publisher
– Worldbuild for an as-yet-unnamed dark fantasy/sf environment

Now that six months has passed, I thought I’d revisit this and see how I did. First and foremost, of course, I did submit Brutal Light to another publisher, and they accepted it for publication. This of course made my brain spin, and threw me onto a new track altogether for writing plans. (Well, that and some personal circumstances that have nothing to do with this.)

While I did manage to submit Onyx Fire to a publisher, I never got around to sending True Places anywhere. In fact, I’ve decided to shelve True Places entirely for the time being. There’s just too much I’m dissatisfied with in it, beginning with how it’s about a third longer than it needs to be. One of these days I’ll take it off the rack and retool it, but not now.

I have started outlining the sequel to Brutal Light (tentatively titled Starless Midnight), much as I said I would. I started the ‘new short story’ indicated above, but have not yet gotten far with it, and I’ve neither retooled the old short story, nor have I submitted Fabulous Beasts anywhere.

Why not? Well, aside from my personal circumstances and being thrown for a happy loop by having Brutal Light accepted for publication, I’ve been at work learning the business end of writing. I’ve expanded and polished the material on this website. I’ve taken a seminar on self-promotion for writers (the publisher does some, but other bits fall to me) and outlined some rough plans for what to do as publication day (12/1/11) approaches. I’ve expanded my contacts on the various social media platforms (and yes, I’m gonna be on Google Ploosh, very soon now). I’ve cut or modified some things I had going on that threatened to compete with what precious time I have available to write. In short, I’ve been at work re-orienting my head from being a writer hoping to get his book published the first time to a writer aiming to get published again and again.

That said, I’m ready to list some tentative goals for the second half of 2011:

– Editing Brutal Light into its final form for publication–once I have an editor assigned to my book, this will be my top priority until it’s done
– Finish outlining Starless Midnight, then write and write and write and write…
– Finish two new short stories – one the story I started back in January, the other a new one for a recently announced anthology
– Submit Onyx Fire to another publisher (should the one that has it now reject it)
– Continue networking and making publicity plans for Brutal Light, and then following through on those plans (something that will take more of my time as December approaches)

I’m looking forward to an amazing (and hectic) second half of the year!

30 Days of Writing #25: Characters With Pets?

25) Do any of your characters have pets? Tell us about them.

It’s kind of rare for my characters to have pets, now that I think about it. Neither Brutal Light nor True Places has any. The main characters in my serialized novelette nihil nations: Electricity in the Rain had a cat, but it was mainly a background detail. My other short works are notably petless. Some pets show up in my Superguy and SfStory writing, but these are also fairly minor (with the notable exception of Lucky, a six-foot-at-the-shoulder mutant cat who is actually someone else’s character anyway) or Not What They Seem.

My most notable usage of ‘pets’ comes in Onyx Fire, the kids book I co-wrote with my wife, Kristyn. It has various animals, domesticated and otherwise, who end up talking during the course of the story–my favorite being Jitters, a hyper-caffeinated, self-absorbed black squirrel… not a pet, okay, but still my favorite.

30 Days of Writing #21: Writing Children?

21) Do any of your characters have children? How well do you write them?

With one major exception, I have largely avoided writing child characters. As far as my Superguy writing goes, only a couple characters have kids, and I didn’t write much featuring them until they were at least in their mid-teens. My adult novels and short stories have not featured child characters in any capacity–they just weren’t relevant to the stories.

The one exception is Onyx Fire, the children’s fantasy book I co-wrote with my wife, and which is currently in search of a publisher. That one featured an elementary-school age girl as the primary protagonist, with assorted other kids and talking animals in other roles. I like to think I wrote them well, but the credit likely belongs more with her.

Scheming into 2011

Looks like we’ve made it mostly intact into 2011. Hope everything went well for you and yours over the last couple weeks — it certainly did for me and mine. I thought I’d take a break this week from the ’30 Days of Writing’ series to talk about my writing plans for the first half of 2011.

I’m aiming to produce a couple new short stories — one all new, and currently under way, and one a full-scale breakdown-and-rewrite of an old one I think can be made saleable. Additionally, I’m determined to produce a detailed outline for Minions, my next novel. (Well, unless Brutal Light finds a publisher, in which case I’ll switch gears and start on the sequel to that one.)

I’m also working on worldbuilding for what I hope will be a long series of fantasy/horror short stories and novelettes and novellas, set in a lush and bizarre world populated by… but that would be telling. I’ve been sloppy in the past when it comes to worldbuilding, I’ll admit — I’ve always preferred to write, see what falls out of my head, and adjust my story to fit it in. But for this particular series to work, I’ve got to nail some things down, or at least come up with a sketch of what these things, and the nail, might look like. I’m quite looking forward to playing in this sandbox.

As far as established works go, I’ll be submitting True Places to another publisher, and see if I can find a home for the short story Fabulous Beasts as well. Plus I need to find somewhere to submit Onyx Fire, and maybe Brutal Light if it gets rejected by the publisher that has it now. You might think this doesn’t belong in a ‘goals’ post, but I’ve been lazy about keeping my momentum with submissions in the past, and that’s got to change.

Stay tuned, and I’ll keep you updated as to how these plans are going. Hope 2011 rocks, for all of us and ours.

30 Days of Writing #5: Youngest and Oldest Characters?

5) By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?

My youngest character would have to be Luca Blackwood, the seven-year-old protagonist of Onyx Fire, the children’s book I co-wrote with my wife (which is also In Search Of… a publisher). It was an interesting experience writing her, as I’m not ordinarily disposed to write pre-adolescent characters–partially because most of my works are aimed at a more mature audience, partially because it’s hard for me to orient my brain toward such a perspective.

My oldest character, as near as I can estimate from a brief survey of my memory, would be Cyane, the siren antagonist of my as-yet-unpublished short story Fabulous Beasts. She hails back to Greece of mythological times. A bit easier for me to work with; that is to say, her age was not her most challenging aspect.

In terms of creation date, my ‘oldest’ character of consequence is likely Rad, protagonist of a self-titled series set in the Superguy shared-universe humorous superheroic fiction list. I essentially lifted a persona and character I created for a Villians and Vigilantes game and ran with it… and somehow, it worked.

‘Youngest’ in terms of creation date would be a character from what I’m working on right now; as such character is still in flux, I’d rather not talk about him too much–save to note that he’s a right bastard. Right bastards are always fun to write.