A Most Excellent Fancy released

https://a.co/d/11SR5Fz

A Most Excellent Fancy is the last of my Kindle Vella projects, and the latest novella now available in paperback. It’s a farce, ultimately, but a tragedy loosely based on a Shakespearean model, with one chapter in verse. This edition incorporates as footnotes the original notes Vella always encouraged authors to include, mostly detailing the famous Shakespeare phrases used as chapter titles. This is also the first time in fiction I use Mount Rushmore as a backdrop, though it shouldn’t be the last. I hugely valued Kindle Vella as a platform, its ability to draw out material I would likely have never written without it. 

New Danab Cycle Short, farewell to Kindle Vella...

I just completed a new Danab Cycle short over at Sigild V, Soldiers of Ancient Seas, which serves as a prequel to the, um, Earth prequel to the, err, Earth prequel to everything that's going to...

Listen, I know this kind of sounds complicated.  I dreamed up all of this many years ago, and've been further developing and expanding the stories I wanted to tell along the way.  Originally it was what has since been entitled Collider, which is the real winner in finishing Soldiers, since it's fully my intention to make finally writing Collider the major project of the year, only oh some three decades in the making.  But the first book I actually wrote was Seven Thunders, which for years I thought, if there was only going to be one book actually written, that was going to be it, but in the years since, just trying to find a publisher, I really have expanded my ambitions.  I plotted out many books before I really got to thinking about the kinds of stories that needed to be told, and so I plotted a couple of prequels, one that revolves around the war that begins all this, and the other about the events that set all this in motion in the first place...

Soldiers is actually a bridge between them.  It's also the first time I've posted a serialized story (comic book scripting excepted)  at the writing blog in years, having in recent years devoted such efforts to Kindle Vella or entirely offline (what a thought!).  Kindle Vella (and I guess I ought to include Wattpad, where I first used an alternative platform, and I walked away from long ago at this point) closed up shop and is officially winding down and taking down content in a handful of days, I'll forever be grateful for, as it somehow provoked me to write stories that I would never have written, lastly A Most Excellent Fancy last year.

Fancy, in my personal files, now incorporates the footnotes the platform encouraged users to include, in the traditional footnote format (which, honestly, if nothing else I'm certainly happy to have been able to do), which I hope I can figure out how to include in a file Kindle itself will allow me to publish in paperback later.  I still have a backlog of material waiting, including the short story collection I'm including Soldiers.  If I can pull off the footnotes I'll be very happy indeed.  

Anyway, ever onward...

A new Kindle Vella project: A Most Excellent Fancy

In the ordinary course of events, Kindle Vella announced it was holding a contest, and eventually I heard about it, and came up with a story for it:

A Most Excellent Fancy

This is my fourth Vella, following somewhat belatedly from the others after tackling two novel manuscripts in the past few years.  Given the rapid nature of the affair, I somewhat calculatedly followed the minimum guidelines (at least ten chapters, at least 10,000 words), which I was able to accommodate given all my writing experience with little difficulty.

Since Vella, as with much of the internet, is geared toward the fancies of the young, I don't know how likely I am, as ever, to spontaneously appeal to their interests, but it's fun to pretend I might otherwise pique some readers.  

Given the timetable (August 20), I buckled down yesterday and got about half the thing done (the first chapter was written a week ago), with the most important, and crucial, material to go, including a fun final chapter and a bonus one to act as coda.

Happily, this project speaks to what I wrote earlier this year (The Children's Crusade), and what I'm tackling next (Abigail Only).

Still haven't started writing again, but that's okay.

A few weeks back I finally spent time with the Burrito (my niece) again, and the whole experience was wonderful.  I ended up with material for the next Christmas chapbook, just not as I wildly imagined it (actively collaborating with the Burrito, who recently won an award for a poem she wrote, by the way).  The Burrito has a younger brother and sister these days.  Liz & Pepe, as I'm currently imagining the title (and see no reason to consider changing it), is named after my youngest niece (and goddaughter!) and her grandfather, my dad (Pepe is French for grandfather).  

I also cooked up another potential novel-length concept, Whitman.  Haven't yet started writing again, but I keep reminding myself that only a few months ago I finished In the Leviathan, and until the Vella era I typically took much longer breaks between long projects.  I also have Don't Throw Baby Out with the Bathwater, technically a professional development project, that I'll be writing, hoping to publish it via Kindle for a particularly professional result (these tend to end up being three-ring binders when they're done by others).  

I kept telling myself, before the trip, wait on the trip to begin working on Children's Crusade.  And here we are weeks later and I still haven't.  Yesterday was the start of a four-day weekend for Memorial Day, so I certainly have plenty of time to work on writing (which I count these trips to the library, when I do the bulk of my blogging efforts these days, as part of, hoping next, as in right after this, to tackle a sequel to Dead Butlers, the scripting exercise that led to Nine Panel Grid).  (As I write this, I'm seriously considering making it a prose effort and not another script.)  (Anyway, just a relatively minor writing effort, keeping the juices flowing.)

All this and gamely plugging Event Fatigue on Twitter occasionally, hoping some schmo will help spark interest in it.  When I think about how far I am from even a figment of someone's imagination of the traditional publishing life, I sometimes regret that.  But getting to write exactly what I want ain't so bad, either.  It led to Leviathan, which could conceivably change all this.  Who knows?  Stranger things have happened.

EDIT: Wrote the "Man in the Box" thing, in comic book script format.  You can read it here.  

So I cooked up TWO new novel(ish)-length projects…

After finishing up In the Leviathan, I certainly didn’t expect I would quickly come up with new projects that weren’t Collider. But I did anyway.

The Children’s Crusade is something I sketched out pretty rapidly once I came up with the idea, tracking a cast of twelve characters across ten sections (two are linked pairs). Using much the track I’ve been riding since first tackling Kindle Vella, I’m pretty confident I can do this. Despite the title, this is not related to the Middle Ages (umm…not technically!), nor Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, but rather that old American chestnut the Fountain of Youth.

And then even more recently I conjured A Centaur Died., another vision of the modern world. These are both very much literary fiction, which I figured was probably a good thing to have in case anyone is interested in publishing Leviathan.

I envision about ten weeks writing Crusade, but I haven’t yet worked out the details in that regard with Centaur. It’ll keep me busy writing in 2023, anyway. Crusade will hit at least 50,000 words (we’ll see how many!), and draws from work experiences both past (as in a decade ago) and present, among other things. By this point I’m pretty clear on how I best approach my fiction, especially long-form. So I would be foolish to back off while the going (at least the writing!) is good. That’s why this is happening.

Event Fatigue published

 

You see that?  I tried doing an actual cover again, using, as I had the last time I did, Canva, and I think it's a decent one, but I'm not particularly objective about it, now am I?

This is of course Event Fatigue, the third and most recent of my Kindle Vella projects, a superhero story, but more specifically about mutants.  Watching the X-Men movies over the years, especially the ones featuring the soft reboot starting First Class in which we follow the younger Professor X and Magneto as they start out being friends and watching the relationship evolve from that point (everyone says Apocalypse was a terrible failure, but I don't agree), and even feature far more cooperation between them than standard continuity suggests possible, I began to wonder what it would be like to totally reexamine all that, what it would be like to explore a mutant team and community where there develops a split in the ranks.  

I had come up with a list of mutants for an otherwise unrelated project, and the idea for this story seemed like a perfect opportunity to finally use them.  As usually happens when I develop an idea, the simplistic setup I started with didn't work out when I actually started writing it, and so that cover image, not quite the one I had for the Kindle Vella site but very close, becomes a joke you'll really just have to read the book to find out.  

Since it was already the longest story I've written in about a decade, it's also the longest book I've published in the smallest format (5" by 8") Kindle has, which I've used for all the material I've published since 2016 (and the same as what I used for all the Mouldwarp Press Presents anthologies, dating back to 2013).

You can buy Event Fatigue on Amazon at this link.

With the three other works of fiction I've announced previously, two volumes of poetry, and this year's Christmas collection, that's seven books I've published this year thanks to Kindle.  

Done writing Event Fatigue!

I finally finished Event Fatigue over at Kindle Vella!

I've been slogging away at this sucker since January, originally a slow and sporadic pace, much as I'd done with the two previous stories I wrote for the platform, but started to realize, a few months ago, at that pace it was probably going to take forever, so I just settled into some daily writing for the first time in a while, and am pleased to have reached the end.

It's not very long, but it's the longest story I've written in about a decade, although ironically it's only about as long as what I had successfully done on a number of occasions previously by completing NaNoWriMo, fifty thousand words written in the month of November.  

As with most of what I write, it didn't turn out as I imagined when I started in, but definitely as someone might expect who's ever read me before, although in a lot of respects, it's the most complete version of what I've done several times in the past, which is to track the perspectives of a large cast of characters, in this instance a group of mutant superheroes who experience a shocking death, and the story explains their reactions, how things got to that point, and how things turn out.  

The term "event fatigue" will be familiar to comic book fans, who in recent decades have generally gotten tired of "event books," massive crossovers that always promise "everything will be different!" until, well, the next massive crossover.  I use it to mean a number of things, including as a commentary on modern times, though never to exactly bludgeon the reader (there's plenty of that on social media, thank you very much).

A funny thing happened along the way, formatting-wise.  I started out writing directly on the platform, but when I got into daily writing, I wrote into the Word document I was compiling chapters into, and pasting that into the platform messed up formatting on the platform itself, and I am not savvy enough to correct such things.  As far as I can tell, no one is reading it there anyway, and the long-term goal is to get another paperback out of it (which, again, will be the longest I've released in a long time, and the longest in the format size I've been using for half a decade), which I plan to expend a little more marketing energy on than I usually do.

I've got other things to tackle.  I've got the next Christmas collection (Uncle Toby), a story I meant to be writing all year (Death Is Wearing Me Out), and of course, as always, recently, Collider.

But it feels really, really good to have finished this!

Updates on Current Doings (or, 2022 Begins to Take Shape)

I sketched up the major projects I'll be tackling this year, Event Fatigue (the third Kindle Vella; previously reported as Ex-Ray: Event Fatigue) and Death Is Wearing Me Out (the once-monthly project succeeding World Famous; a ghost story, since it's apparently the thing that attracts me at the moment).  Both should be very, very interesting, and more accessible than their predecessors (World Famous, being about wrestling, and Nine Panel Grid, which is probably quite impenetrable).

But let's talk about those a little more, shall we?  Technically I should've finished World Famous by the end of last year.  Didn't really turn out that way.  I have two chapters yet to write, but they'll be easy enough to finish, and would've been done this morning if the very computer I'm using at the moment had cooperated (clever companies think they improve everything when they sometimes make them needlessly complicated).  In hindsight I'm all the happier I chose to do this a year ago, and that I plugged away at it dutifully (sometimes with a little catching up).  

Even Nine Panel Grid, since it handles a story I intended to write nearly two decades earlier (alas, a comics contest I probably hilariously fell far short of even coming close to winning).  I'm now six chapters away from finishing, about a month and a half, since it's mostly a once-a-week project, having started at the beginning of October.

Event Fatigue will be forty-four chapters, the longest by far (double the length of Nine Panel) I've tackled for Kindle Vella.  I still need to flesh out the story, but it's going to be pretty straight-forward, and also involve superheroes.  I picked out a cover image that hopefully at least stands out a little better than my last two.  It also picks up characters originally derived from an older project, which only occurred to me when I finally sat down to begin an outline.  This one should be fun.

I'm still writing up material for Substack, in the meantime.  I have no idea if I have a chance at developing an actual following there, but it's worth an effort.  I plan to devote one installment to Nine Panel Grid, perhaps write an actual story (you'd understand if you had a look at Nine Panel exactly what I'm talking about) and the journey to working on it.  I did write a story in the Space Corps saga, and probably will do more in the future.

I know I was just talking about Space Colony Bactria, and obviously Collider, and I really need to get on Montague, but as a writer doing it on the side, I have to decide the projects that can work around the schedule.  

As always, we'll see.

Kindle Vella adventures continue

 I just submitted the eleventh installment of Nine Panel Grid at Kindle Vella, which is the halfway point for the story.  Like Aronnax it isn't exactly blowing up in popularity (actually, like any of my works!), but at least with this one I would totally understand readers not at all understanding what it is that it's supposed to be accomplishing.  This one's very much something that appeals to my sensibilities.  I would have to be someone readers already care about in order to care about it, and that isn't part of this reality, so...!

The good news is I already have another Kindle Vella project lined up, and I think it will be an easier sell.  It's called Ex-Ray: Event Fatigue, and I'm going to try and be conventional with this one.  Really!  Try!  With me this is always a difficult proposition.  Once I sketch it out I will probably even be writing it simultaneously with Nine Panel, and it'll be a longer story.

As I wrote last time I checked in, I submitted Seven Thunders to an agent last weekend, and said agent somehow thought it was a great idea to get back to me on Thursday with a rejection notice.  So that was pretty cool.  Maybe they were having a really bad Thanksgiving, apparently having to work an' all, I don't know.  It may have contributed to how yesterday began playing out for me, but realistically, everyone who participates in this game struggles to get in, and since I have been playing so poorly it doesn't really surprise me to still be on the bench, but I'm determined not to give up.  I'm gonna persist.  

I did just send out Christmas presents, including this year's collection, Gracie, which I would like to believe is another opportunity to at least convince my family I'm worth rooting for, but who knows?  I had fun writing it, anyway.

Nine Panel Grid, Gracie, World Famous...

 This week I'm on vacation, and I'm doing something somewhat insane.  I'm working on three different projects simultaneously.

One of them is Nine Panel Grid, my second Kindle Vella project.  (You can follow the progress here.  I've already posted the three chapters you can read for free, and submitted the next one a moment ago.)  This one's a strange beast that I'm tackling one chapter at a time to see how it might evolve.  It's a rare story where I heavily suspect I would have to do revisions once this draft is completed, if I hope for it to be anything more than it currently is.  At any rate it's very interesting to write.

I'm also tackling Gracie, the follow-up to George & Gracie, the title story and lead to my annual Christmas collection that'll be sent out to family.  Here we are in October.  The plan is to write a chapter every day through Sunday, and since I planned for seven chapters, if I manage to keep that up I'll have that part done by then.  (My dad actually asked about this year's Christmas poem yesterday!  He's never interested in my writing.  And this is the first time anyone's anticipated one of these at all, so that was doubly pleasant to hear.  I'll tackle the poem later, which is never very hard to write.)

I'm also having to play catch-up with World Famous, a project I've been working on all year, not a long story, but possibly the longest story I'll have written since I was writing novel manuscripts routinely a decade back.  Two more days and I'll be caught up, so don't worry.  It continually surprises me how easy this one's been to write (but then I'm once again returning to the well of each chapter being from a new perspective, which I've done a number of times at this point in my fiction), and today's was no exception.  It helped I got to put in some dialogue for a change.  I love crazy conversations.  But then, that's the kind you're likely to have with me in the real world, too.  I just have more to say when I'm writing, is all.

So I did all three today.  All I need to do is repeat that twice more.  I'm not sure how many chapters of Nine Panel Grid I want to do this week.  If I do three or four more (counting Thursday and Saturday, which is usually when I work on Kindle Vella chapters; Friday I'll be headed out to watch some movies, so I expect only to work on Gracie), fine.  This one's twenty-two chapters, so I'm not in a rush to finish it like I was Aronnax last vacation, not by any stretch.  I have no specific time-table for it.  Working on it at all this week is a bonus, especially given the other stories.

As of today it's a great way to spend a vacation.  When I was writing novel manuscripts I was either underemployed or not employed at all, or had time to kill under unusual circumstances.  Since I've been working full time at my current job, it's been tough to motivate myself to spend a lot of time writing (even though I desperately want to finally write Collider) (which I hope will happen next year), although I've certainly worked on a number of projects, put out a few story collections this year alone.  

Everyone at work asked me where I was going.  Well, to the library, to a land called Wendale, to right here in Tampa...

Nine Panel Grid begins

 Nine Panel Grid is my next Kindle Vella project.  It's kind of complicated.

As you might know from following my work in recent years, I've been doing a lot of comic book script writing.  Not because I've been hired by a comic book publisher or am getting the scripts illustrated, but to gain experience in doing the work.  Originally, Nine Panel Grid was going to be another one of those.

I kind of figured if Kindle Vella readers had any patience at all for my work, they probably were never going to indulge something like that.  So I developed a different approach.  This one follows three separate tracks on a fictional comic book issue: the story in the comics, the story of the art, and the history of the comic.  

Nine Panel Grid draws from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen and Jack Kirby's New Gods.  To this point I don't think there's been a ton of overlap between appreciation of the two, but it's what interested me.  The title of my story draws on Watchmen's style, nine panels in a grid format on a page.  In recent years Tom King has been using the format pretty heavily, so I figured it was well-known enough to use as a term and the title of a story.

Again, there will be no art.  The conceit of the whole thing requires the reader to imagine the art for themselves, so I had to at least visualize for myself what the art would look like, so I could write it up for the story.

I have no idea if there's even remotely an audience for this, let alone on Kindle Vella.  It interests me.  What can I say?

Aronnax, completed

I just finished writing the twelfth and final chapter Aronnax.

I’ve been working on this since the end of July, and for the first six chapters, it was one chapter a week. This week, I was on vacation, so starting on Tuesday, I wrote every day. They were never overly long chapters. The complete story is somewhere around 12k (actually 13,440, plus notes I intend to include in a future print edition) words, generously  considered a novelette, very generously a novella (I’ve published a whole string of novellas in the past five years, I should know). Not so long.

But I’m pretty happy with it.

As with a few other stories I’ve done over the years, each chapter is from a different perspective. Most of them deliberately cut off the narrative to keep the ending a secret, but the thrust of this one thing, Captain Nemo’s submarine the Nautilus, as a catalyst in disparate lives, remains at the heart of the story, I hope in effective ways. The idea, as with all the good stories, is to tell something about the human condition.

Hopefully something worthwhile.

The chapter will populate later today at Kindle Vella, and that’ll be that. I haven’t decided if I will tackle another project on the platform, a longer one (it wasn’t the original intention for Aronnax to be twelve chapters, but that ended up feeling like its natural shape), as apart from the story I’ve been writing once a month every month this year (I will have to play catch-up next weekend as I took up last month’s slot with Aronnax) I really haven’t told a full-length story in ages, and I have yet to find the courage to begin tackling Collider (maybe next month’s week-long vacation!). 

But it always feels nice to work on a story, and to finish it. With this one the original goal was to retell Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea without Nemo, or Nemo minimized, or Nemo contextualized. I think I accomplished that.

Aronnax (2.0)

 About a month ago, I was completing a project and attempting to publish it via Amazon's KDP when I hit the unexpected snag of Kindle needing to know who the translator was for the edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea I had transcribed from.  The idea of the project wasn't a complete transcription, although it had originally been intended to be a partial one, and the rest of the story completely rewritten or cherrypicked, as I had determined, when I read the book five years earlier, that I liked the parts without Captain Nemo best.

Well, I didn't know the translator, and Kindle didn't like that, so the book was left unpublished.  I had transcribed only to the point Pierre Aronnax and company discover the Nautilus, and as yet are unaware of its true nature, much less its chief occupant.  I'm not sure Jules Verne really nailed the shape of Nemo's role, but I loved the opening act as the mystery of the Nautilus unfolds, a kind of lost coda to the great age of maritime exploration last represented by Moby-Dick, so that's what I chose to feature in my version, and that alone.

Then I decided to tackle the idea from a different vantage point.  Kindle has recently launched Vella, a serialized storytelling venture, and that's one thing I can always make time for, so last week I launched a revised version that features entirely original writing, a parallel narrative recapping the Verne tale and a modern sequel in which a descendant of Aronnax, a deteriorating Nautilus resting in his backyard, decides to undertake one last adventure.

I don't know how often I'll be plugging away at this, maybe once a week or so, which is the pace, at two weeks, I have set, but you can keep up with the results here.  I also don't know how long it'll be, and I haven't attempted to prepare a full outline.  At times such things can feel like both blessing and curse, as I have discovered with other current projects.  I know the shape of it, thanks in part to half being drawn from existing material, as well as the probable conclusion to the original material.  

Should be interesting.