julesjones

Nice Tie now has a finished first draft. A very, very rough first draft, but it is, nevertheless. done. All 40 kwords of it.

I'd been hoping to get it down in draft by the end of March at the latest, but was rudely interrupted by a bad bout of Real Life. Also, I was visited by Plot in the course of writing it, and while I knew what was going to happen, I was failing to find the exact words to describe it. Even the words I had found earlier had escaped me, scattered on the four winds, during a previous hiatus after the initial burst of writing during PicoWrimo.

It's going to need some heavy revision, not least because the chunk I've been wrestling with over the last two months is happily demonstrating that I do not see my stories inside my head as films, but hear them as radio plays. There is much dialogue, and little description, and I need to improve the ratio somewhat before it goes anywhere near Ye Editor. It has for now gone off to Predatrix for some alpha-reading, to see if it makes sense anywhere outside my own head.

I should probably leave it alone for a bit and come back to it with fresh eyes in a week or two. Time to think about what to work on next, particularly with summer PicoWrimo coming up. There's Taxman, which has been worked on fitfully for some six years now, and can perfectly well wait a bit longer. There's the story idea that I was using to experiment with using Dragon to write a first draft, which I think might work well as an offering for Loose Id's tenth anniversary next year. And there are a couple of... things... which my muse handed me recently, apparently after a hard night binging with the girls on cream cakes and hard core porn DVDs.

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I forgot to mention that I have a new toy, namely an account on Authorgraph. This site provides an interface for readers to request electronic autographs from authors, whether to add to their ebooks, or to print out and keep with a print book. And yes, it really is a personalised autograph if you so choose. The author can type a message and then sign their name using a tablet, and the resulting file shows the actual signature process.

It's funded by affiliate links to Amazon, so you can only request signatures for books available on Amazon. However, you don't need to have a Kindle to request or display the autographs.

I've put most of my titles currently available on Amazon into the system, and you can find my account here http://www.authorgraph.com/authors/bookfetishist should you wish to have a play.

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Well, that was fun. :-) And nice to see the Paternoster Gang being shown with a bit more depth -- Strax in particular, as he's suffered a bit from being the comic relief.

( spoilers, sweetieCollapse )

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I spent a large chunk of yesterday afternoon editing the rough draft of the urban confessions story down from 6100 to 5000 words, and sent it off to Predatrix last night for comments. She seems to think it works, so after another quick typo hunt, I spent a large chunk of this afternoon formatting it according to the editor's guidelines -- which include the requirement to provide a short blurb.

I hate writing blurbs. I believe I have mentioned this before.

Also, I only use MSWord at home when I have no other choice, and while I use it at work, we're still on 2003 at work and I have the ribbon-infested 2007 at home, which results in much swearing every time I have to use the wretched thing and can't find where they've put assorted standard functions. However, the file is on its way to the editor's inbox. If she doesn't like it, I shall probably add some material and self-publish it at Smashwords, at which point I may have to consider setting up a new pseudonym.

It was fun writing fluffy porn, but it was rather noticeable that I had to make a determined effort to stop it from picking up more plot than fluffy porn needs. I could probably get a rather longer story out of it without much effort. Nevertheless, I would like to point out to my usual editor that I can so write a short story that *stays* a short story. :^) Even if not very often...

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Finished the rough draft of the confession short. It's 6 kwords, which is only a minor overrun on a target of 5 kwords, at least by my standards. I can see about 200 words marked up on the way through for potential trimming, but I'm going to have do some more serious trimming if I want to send it to the market I wrote it for. On the other hand, I could quite easily expand it by another couple of thousand words without bloating it, and push it slightly more to the romantic end of erotica. That's still outside the remit of my usual markets, but I could self-publish it.

I shall let it sit for a day or two, and then look at it again with a view to editing/rewriting into two different length versions.

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Just been putting my latest royalty statement into the spreadsheet, and it would appear that Dolphin Dreams has achieved over 3000 copies sold since it was released. This is very small beer indeed compared with the sales figures of my friends who are published with the Big 6, but it's not bad for a small press title. I am pleased -- and have an incentive to get on with the new novel, in order to see what happens to my backlist sales if I get a new title out for the first time in five years.

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After a certain amount of fighting with PayPal, I have paid for my ticket to the UK GLBT Fiction Meet. This does not necessarily mean that I will be there, given the ongoing medical problems, but at least I've got a ticket now.

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At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

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...it would appear that I have temporarily burnt out on writing sex scenes.

Or at least I'm having trouble getting any further with the one I should be writing at the moment. Okay, it's porn, and I mean porn as in True Confessions, not literotica, but there's actually a smidgen of plot in there and I feel enough interest in the characters and setting to keep my Inner Editor happy. But apparently I have run out of ways to describe the actual insert tab A in slot B bit. Even though I *want* to write this story, about these guys and what they're doing.

This is what happens if I lay off the 300 words a day for a month. :-( Had too many other things to juggle, and I was struggling with the scene anyway, and now that I have time/energy to work on it, I can't get back into it. Can't even skip this and go on to a new bit, because it's a 5 kword short (and one of the reasons for doing it is to get in some practice at writing to a specific length).

I suppose I'll have to do the other trick, which is stare at the screen each night for as long as it takes to wring out at least 50 words. That does eventually kick-start most things.

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This morning's post included the cheque for my short story in the Mammoth anthology. Yes, an actual cheque. This may not be of great interest to those of you who spell it "check" but here in the UK, the banks were making a determined effort to make the cheque an extinct species, on the grounds that nobody used them anyway and all the cheques that people weren't using cost too much money to process.

It's quite true that cheque usage has dropped drastically, but that's not the same thing as either a) they are no longer used, or b) that there are no situations where cheques are more convenient. I suspect that were I trying to handle the logistics of an anthology with over 100 stories, I would much rather deal with a list of names and addresses than a list of names, address and bank transfer details.

The anthology in question is officially released in the UK tomorrow. So far I have only read a handful of the other stories in my trib copy, but the ones I've read, I've liked. They didn't all do it for me as porn, for Not My Kink reasons, but they were still good *stories*.

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