Reviews!
I received a lovely review of Refuge on Smashwords this morning. (Well, it was posted last night, but I *saw* it this morning.) It isn’t even by someone I know! Thank you, Toren Taylor! I’m very glad you enjoyed the book. 
And many thanks to my good friend Sarah for posting reviews on Amazon!
*happydance*
(Oh, and in case you were expecting some other sort of review, go see Avengers – it is the best movie I’ve seen in the theater in a while, and well worth seeing on the big screen!)
(I think I’m going a little overboard on the exclamation points in this post… Oh well!!!)
If I can just get the murder right…
I keep thinking, if I can just get the murder right, everything else will start falling into place.
Or maybe it should be a kidnapping, instead of a murder.
Or a kidnapping, and *then* a murder…
Or a murder, followed by a kidnapping!
But why would they kidnap the body? And once they’re dead, isn’t it body-theft instead of kidnapping? Unless nobody else knows they’re dead…
Ah-ha!
(Or maybe not. So many possibilities, so little time!)
Writing again!
I’m very happy to say that I woke up feeling pretty clear-headed this morning, and actually wrote for a couple of hours!
I’m likely to throw out about half of it, but that’s actually a good thing too – I know *why* to throw it out, and what to write in its place.
*happy*
Villains…
I’m not very good with writing villains or antagonists, so i’m working on studying them.
My question for you is: what are your favorite bad guys? What did you like best about them?
Thanks
Wow… 3 weeks since I last posted…
And roughly the same since I last wrote, more disturbingly!
There were reasons – fatigue from a virus, then bronchitis, then as soon as I was over that Brian and I started going to Crossfit (Yankee Crossfit, specifically), and I was exhausted from that…
(And hmm… they have a recipe for Chicken Paprikash posted today that I might need to look at more closely.)
Anyway… writing. Today, I did some more work on Refuge: Tales from a Zombie Apocalypse, fixing a couple of problems that my awesome beta readers pointed out, and a couple more that I noticed in my re-read. It’s always interesting to read something I’ve written after a long enough break that it’s not all in the forefront of my mind already. Easier to actually read what’s on the page than what’s in my head that way, for sure.
So I think the draft is done, and even better – I really like it! Next up: look up how the formatting for Smashwords and Kindle need to be done and get to work on that. Hopefully I’ll be able to get that done this week – if not, I guess next weekend… we’ll see. In any case, it’ll be done soon, where “soon” is a value somewhere between tomorrow and a month from tomorrow. :-p
Tree Lobsters, Dark Matter, and Zombies, oh my!
And zombies…
I’ve finished the last of the stories for Refuge: Tales from a Zombie Apocalyps, for a given value of “finished.” There will be seven stories in total, all set in the same world. The collection includes the long-time favorite “Corpse Pose,” and was, in fact, inspired by it.
I still have major revisions to make on one of the stories, plus a polish for all the others, but I’m hoping to publish the whole shebang next weekend, after getting comments back from a couple of patient, generous, and long-suffering beta-readers. 
(If you’d like to join them, and expect to have time this week, shoot me an email and we’ll see what we can do.)
Coming soon, to an ebookseller near you :)
I’m still working on finishing up the stories, editing and so on, but I hope to have this published to Smashwords, Amazon, and B&N in a week or so. I’m also planning to offer a coupon here so that all of you can get it for free this time.
Always learning…
Learning what kind of writer I am is a fascinating process.
Sometimes, I’ll write and write, and though the words are fine there’s no real story underneath to hold them together. This usually happens when I think I know what story I want to write.
A lot of writers talk about themselves as a duality – the everyday self who does the grunt work of typing, and the muse, or the writer-brain, or lizard-brain, or the characters, or the story council.
I’m definitely finding that I have the same sensation. That there’s a part of me that can spin magic into a story, and a part of me that can type and edit and spell correctly and remember what the character’s names are, and that successful fiction writing requires a delicate balancing act between the two.
In some ways, I feel like I sit down and start writing, and by doing so I invite my writer-brain to come out and see. I’m coaxing it out, like putting out bits of food to coax a small animal out of its hole. And like that small animal, if I look too closely or too directly at it, then it’ll flee back into its hole and make me start the hole process over again.
But if I manage to coax it out and not scare it off, my writer-brain will start poking at the words I’m writing. Sometimes an image of what happens next will pop into my mind, or I’ll realize something I’ve already written should change in *this* precise way.
Once in a great while, my writer-brain will get confident enough to take over, and then the writing flies but I don’t recognize everything when I read over it again. (Sleep deprivation will also have this effect, but I don’t recommend it.)
But a lot of the time I forget that I’m trying to coax out a shy and temperamental part of my mind, and I write blithely on with no attention to anything else, and then wonder why the story isn’t coming out the way I wanted it to. :-p
Braiiiins…
This week…
I’m counting this as “week four” of January for the plan I detailed in the last post, and working on a new short story collection: Zombie Variations.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but I’ve been getting in my own way, I’m afraid. For some reason when my thinking brain spins out lots of “cool ideas” for stories based on logic and reason and articles I’ve read about diseases and nature and so on… my writing brain goes on strike. It seems like the first seed of a story has to come from my writing brain, or else it’s not going to happen.
And since I only had two zombie stories and a few scintillas, I didn’t really feel like there was enough to make a collection out of. If I’m going to put something up for sale, I want the buyer to get more than five minutes of entertainment out of it!
Getting out of my own way…
Getting back into writing after time off is always hard, so I started a few days ago with a new short story – “The Zombie’s Cat.”
Then another one just sort of happened the next day – “Henry.” (Another tear-jerker, I’m afraid, like The Last Day of School. I was crying while I wrote it, at any rate.
I think I know how to expand Lanie’s scintillas into a full story now, and Corpse Pose is going to get an edit and polish too.
And yes, you will get to read them! Once the collection is done and posted to Smashwords, B&N, and Amazon, I’ll post a Smashwords coupon here for a free download – my friends and readers deserve it! The coupon will be good for a month from when I post it, and you can download pretty much any reader format from Smashwords, so keep an eye out. 
Mars, Status Update, and Planning…
First off, happy belated 8th anniversary to the Mars Rover Opportunity! I think it’s so very awesome that it’s still going!
Status Update:
OK, so I haven’t written since Sunday, because of going away for a trade show for work Monday through Wednesday, and being too darned tired to write yesterday or this morning… But leaving that aside, I think my first month has gone very well.
The first draft has 20,528 words, and while it isn’t *finished,* I have a good idea of how the last part of the story goes. So I’m going to settle for writing a summary of what happens next in case I come back to it later, and move on to the next one in accordance with my plan.
I definitely think I’ve learned from the experience of my first month, though nothing solid enough to really talk about. I’m looking forward to what the rest of the year will bring!
Planning:
Speaking of which, for February I’m going to try to pattern my writing as follows:
First week: Introduce the characters, the world, and the key problems, as well as complications.
Second week: The characters try to address their problems and make things worse, but there are hints of what the final resolution will be.
Third week: Achieve the final resolution and tie up loose ends.
Week four: Work on short stories, and maybe put one up for sale on Amazon. This’ll give me a chance to let go of the last long story and its pattern before starting the next one. It’ll also let me start building up a body of work for sale, for readers to find me by.
In fact, I think that’s what I’m going to work on this coming week, as January ends and February begins. I think I might take a fresh look at Changing Course.
I’ve been seeing a lot of short stories published as stand-alones for $0.99, and even bought a couple, so it seems like a more reasonable idea to me than it once did. What do you guys think? A decent way to put stuff out there for new readers to find?
© 2010 Catherine Wechsler, used with permission.
