Writing Update
After focusing on the first round of BackTracker edits, I took a month or so off and did a lot of reading and watching. It felt good to kick back and relax a bit, dive into some recent future noir and space opera novels -- two of my favorite genres. Thanks to Netflix, I also caught up on a few of my favorite series, and I finally got around to seeing a bunch of movies I've been wanting to check out.
But I didn't do any writing.
Maybe because I thought I deserved a break. I've been going full-tilt at this fun little hobby for the past seven years now, and after qualifying for SFWA membership and seeing all of my short stories published, my ultimate goal was to see if a major publisher would be interested in my novels. I spent January burning my proverbial candle at both ends, revising a 150-thousand word manuscript, and I needed some time to recover after that. A few weeks turned into a month and a half. And it was glorious.
So I started working on the second draft of The Gifted Ones, a new Charlie Madison novel. It picks up where The Suprahuman Secret leaves off and wraps up the whole mystery, once and for all. I wrote it longhand last year, so now I'm typing it up and polishing it as I go. That helped with the itchy restlessness for a while, but it wasn't enough. Because I wasn't writing anything NEW. I've had a few ideas for new Dahlia & Brawnstone, Roadkill Joe, and Captain Quasar stories, but I've kept them on the back burner, figuring it was time to focus on my novels. For now, my short story writing days were over.
Not so much, as it turns out.
At last count, I'm over five thousand words into a new Roadkill Joe tale, a couple thousand into a new Dahlia & Brawnstone story, and I'm plotting out a series of Captain Quasar tales that will take place after the novel. I'm also sending reprints of my stories out to international markets by the bucket-load. And that itchy restless feeling in my brain? Gone.
Not so much, as it turns out.
At last count, I'm over five thousand words into a new Roadkill Joe tale, a couple thousand into a new Dahlia & Brawnstone story, and I'm plotting out a series of Captain Quasar tales that will take place after the novel. I'm also sending reprints of my stories out to international markets by the bucket-load. And that itchy restless feeling in my brain? Gone.
Writers write. And sure, we read and watch, too. But like Ray Bradbury once said, "If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both." Thankfully, I haven't gotten that far.
And I don't plan to.
And I don't plan to.