Clearly I have been remiss in blogging. I am equally as remiss on twittering, or tweeting, or whatever you want to call the platform I will henceforth refer to as micro-chat. Seriously, how can anyone say anything useful in 140 characters? Most of the time I see people post, and post, and post again to get a complete thought out.
But this is the way of things. I would be ignorant to ignore the social media conventions that exist for a writer, new or old, to share with their readers. Oh, I’m sure there are famous authors who are famously reclusive and can ignore social media completely, eshue it for that air of mystery they cultivate as they sit in their cabin in the deep woods of some far off land and bang away on a typewriter, producing their Next Great Novel which will be eagerly consumed by their hordes of fans.
I have five fans who subscribe to my blog. One of them is myself, so I can make sure the posts are emailing as expected. Two of them are my wife, who subscribed when I set this up but did so twice by accident. So I have… two fans. Well that’s better than none I suppose, and I am grateful for their interest, even if it was a spur of the moment, “I’ll just delete these posts without reading them” sort of thought on their part.
I’ve spent most of the last few weeks writing a new short story. There was an interesting prompt on the Fantasy Writers forum on Reddit, their story contest for December. I had expected something holiday themed, but the writing prompt was “Orcs in space.” Write a fantasy story that revolves around some sort of space theme. And that inspired me to write Monkton’s story, which dribbled off my fingers in a few short days, has gone through a few days of re-writes, and… well… to be honest, I liked it so very much I didn’t want to post in online for free. It’s a story about stories, how stories are created during a lifetime of experiences and how those stories fade and go away when a life is over. It’s more than that of course, a story of a journey, a story about the desire to change and be more than what we are.
I’ve submitted it to Tor, though now I wish I had started with some other magazines because of the long period of time Tor takes to get back to folks (understandable given their well-above-industry-standard rate of pay). So it’ll sit festering for a few months as I wait to hear anything, and if it gets rejected I’ll go ahead and try some other places. It’s one of those stories I think has some real bones to it. And rejection no longer scares me or bothers me, for I AM a writer whether the agents and publishers want me or not. I know what I am, and eventually they will, too. Arrogant and boastful? A bit perhaps… but it’s better than being self-deprecating to the point of self-loathing about my work, which has improved leaps and bounds in the past three years.
So I’ll work on a few other shorts and the second Mercy Sinclair story. I decided to read the first of the Dresden File books as well since I had heard about them (magical detective working in Chicago), and it’s a good read. Definite similarities, which is a bit unfortunate (he drives a Beetle, which Mercy starts the novel driving as well… ouch). Modern noir urban fantasies revolving around private eyes… there was going to be some, though the car thing was horrendously ridiculous a coincidence. Honestly, I didn’t read any of them until afterI finished the first Mercy novel, but I’m sure there will be inevitable comparisons once my books are published, and that can’t be helped. They are similar, but very different, and hopefully neither will detract from the fans of the others. He’s a good writer… hopefully people will think I am as well, and I’d certainly enjoy having the success he’s had.
I wanted to go into Generation X, my generation in this post… but nah, there’s a lot of negativity I’m feeling right now towards the generation that proceeded us and the one that followed us, and I’d rather not insult groups with which I have friends. I think Generation X has been lost in the shuffle of the two larger generations, both of which greatly outnumber us (the Millennials now outnumber the Boomers in fact, in terms of those of voting age, as the boomers are dying off now). Individuals are fine, but a collective look at both groups… yeah, let’s just skip that here, it’s not worth the price of my typing on the screen.
Long ramble… that’s what happens when I don’t act socially for a while.