Well, I've tried to maintain 2 blogs (this one for writing, a livejournal account for more personal stuff). It's ended up that I put both personal and writing posts over at livejournal and thus have neglected this journal over the past couple of months.  So now I'm going to leave this one static for awhile, and put all my blogging/posting up at the link below. Please do stop by and say hello!:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sbarret/

 

So I managed to write the succubus erotica short story for the Bella anthology. It clocked in at 2600 words and seems to be an okay first draft. I'll let it sit and stew a few days before I edit and ship it off to Bella Books. Wish me luck! Meanwhile, I need to write part 8 for Academy's Finest. I want to finish this novella before Nano month. tic tic tic.

Wow! So I've been doing weekly updates for 7 weeks now. I have 2 or 3 more to finish the novella off. It's been an interesting experience, mostly because it's unscripted, and it has to be done on time every Sunday night.  I'm not sure I'll do another one any time soon. I'll have to think about it. The bennies are that you get some nice folks saying they like your story, the cons are you just lost your first serial rights buy publishing on the web. I know there are publishers in this genre who will still accept the book (and in this case, it would be more than 2x the size before I'd ship it to a publisher, making it a full novel). But anyway...

Current working title is Riding the Storm. I wrote about 1/3 or so of the story last night and I think it's coming out resonably well. It's erotica, which I've never written before. Gotta say, you do tend to run out of ways to write about "you know what" without using the same phrases over and over... heh. cough. I haven't had any bright ideas about the Fey story yet. Academy's Finest, and part time techwriting at night have been keeping me busy. But one (or both) will be done by the end of the month, so life will get back to normal. The future for Academy's Finest shouldbe interesting. I'll have about a 25k novella out of it that I hope to eventually flush out into a full novel length and peddle it at a publisher or two. Meanwhile meanwhile, haven't heard A THING from either publisher I sent my other two books to. One was a full manuscript and it's been not quite 3 months, so I need to be patient. The other was just a query/synopsis and it's been 3 months for that. Somehow that seems excessive, no? I'm not sure how long I should wait for the query as that publisher was a longshot anyway...

They are looking for GLBT stories about the Fey. Fairy folk etc. Not necessarily erotic, but definitely glbt. It has a February deadline I think, so I may try for that after I get the Bella anthology story going. It's a good time to be a queer author right now :-) Meanwhile, Academy's Finest is coming along. Part 6 is up and it will only go to ten parts. It will finish in time for me to head into Nano month. I'm not doing it officially, but I hope to make progress on Romulus during that month.

Just this and that as my mind wanders at work. I have yet to start part 5 of <u>Academy's Finest</u>. I have started more interesting freelance work though, so I'm happy about that. I'll be writing parts of a high-level networking solutions guide. My sound boring to y'all but it's great experience for the ol' resume.

As for Nano - I won't be doing it officially this year, but I hope to use it to get back into doing my 2YN novel - <u>Raising Romulus</u>.  We'll see...

So Bella Books has a call for submissions to a supernatural anthology. It's erotica crossed with vamps/witches/demons etc. So I'm trying to think of what I want to write for it. I know, a long shot, but it'd be fun anyway. My options, in no particular order:

• Develop a deadJade story - probably 1st person, sarcastic pov ;-)  She could either go after her new human coworker for a hot one-nighter, or go after the young vamp she met at the bar a week or so ago. This would be minor supernatural mixed with heavy sarcasm (cuz that's just deadjade).
• Create a new story based on witches. Or a witch and a vamp? Sounds a bit too Buffy when ya put it that way.  This would focus more on erotica...
• A demon sex story. Demon with demon most likely.
• Zombie love. Okay that's not even a fully-formed thought but I can't think of any other story based on reanimated corpses.
• A story where the MC is half-human, half-succubi. Kinda makes her a nymphomanic, eh? Interesting fodder for a story though.

I'm not so stellar w/ the scary stuff. Makes it hard to write scary stories, doesn't it? Of course the guidelines say it can be either creepy or fun.

Okay, not really marathon - but I've been doing weekly updates to Academy's Finest and now I find myself one day away from the deadline, and nothing written yet. eek! that's 3k words I need to complete by tomorrow evening if I want to keep on track. Tic Tic Tic. Meanwhile, I managed to finish my freelance assignment earlier than I thought, so at least the tech writing work is out of the picture for the rest of the weekend. That's a bonus. I haven't been to Forward Motion much in the past month. I really need to get back into the habit of checking over there. I was writing more when I was reading that site more. Maybe I'll go check it now... Oh, and Holly has a blog again if anyone's interested. read-only but still. Go check out Joel's blog to find the link (I haven't bookmarked it yet). Now if only StarDoc would start blogging again- that was some good times...

I know I haven't been posting regularly here. There hasn't been much going on for the writing lately. I have part 3 of Academy's Finest uphere. That's all I've written lately. I must admit I'm enjoying the seat-o-the-pants writing. There is no formal plotting or characterization for this novellete (thus it's going up for free...). It's a nice break but I should get moving on the outline for the Damek sequel. As for the upcoming NanoWriMo, well I don't have much hope of doing it this year. Last year I was unemployed and managed 50k in a month. This year I will (hopefully) be employed and thus not having nearly as much time to write as I'd like. We'll see how things go by then.

I got part 2 of Academy's Finest up at Academy of Bards Other than that, I took on a side contract to help out a friend. That's gonna keep me busy and make getting part 3 of my story difficult to finish by Sunday night. Add to that taking the kids camping over the weekend, and woo-eee I'll be busy for the next week or two...