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.  

Nine Panel Grid, World Famous released, Event Fatigue

 I've added Event Fatigue to the list of my Kindle Vella projects on the right.  Apparently I skipped a month between chapters, but will be digging back in.  Two additional will be populating today, and, well, there are plenty more to come. 

Happily I can announce the release of a book from the second Kindle Vella project, Nine Panel Grid!

Keeping my present preferences, there is only a paperback release, which you can find here.  This is something of a metafiction, a story about a comic book that doesn't exist, detailing what happens in its final issue, including descriptions of art that does not exist, and a history that is equally fictional.  It involves characters I began working on nearly two decades ago, including one I created nearly three decades ago.  So it's got a lot of real history behind it, too, plus a bonus comic book script that's a version of Batman relevant to the story.  It's very much a project that's very interesting to me, and I will be peddling copies to a comic book shop that recently opened down the road from me, and I will keep you informed about that as things develope.

A few weeks before this one I also released World Famous, a story I worked on occasionally throughout 2021 (and finished earlier this year).

Likewise this is only a paperback release, which you can find here.  As the cover heavily implies, this one is about professional wrestling, and draws on stuff I've been dabbling with for the same general three decade period, so this has certainly been a good time to be writing stories on old material for me.  

Later I will be releasing my first Kindle Vella project, Aronnax, when I decide what (if anything) to add in order to bulk up the page count a little.  I have a timeline I put together for the abortive project that led to Aronnax, and I could certainly include the associated essay as well.  Who knows what else.  

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?