Wanna read my novel?

(And if anyone is like, "Yeah, well, maybe, but you might suck, like, a lot," you can check out my last published story. The novel is a completely different style, but y'know, you can at least tell I know how to spell and stuff.)

(I am all pluggy. That's so lame. It's all free, though!)

Sending it out to you kind folks now.

It's strange to have people on a forum where I am not primarily known for my writing reading this novel. I totally feel like someone's scoping out my kids.

And thanks! Damn, up to 5. I know it's fast-paced, but you're quick.

l.o.v.e.d.i.t

now I'm goin to bed.

Glad you liked it :)

Really. It's GOOD. (You probably know this already)

(Let me see if I can phrase the following without spoilers: after I finish the things I'm working on in various stages right now, I'm toying with the idea of a sequel. Specifically, two sequels which contradict each other. There is a character in the novel who I will call Ted. In one of the sequels, Ted did not survive the first story, and the action progresses without him, building on different threads; in the other, Ted DID survive, and the action progresses because of his actions.)

But who knows, I can't really rationally approach the material just yet, I've got a fantasy thing on the plate, a robot space opera thing in brainstorming, and a hard-boiled fairy tale I will probably work on in the lulls.

My first ook-bay will be ublished-pay this ummer-say, but it isn't this one. I'll update this thread when there's something to update with, but this is largely what I'm so busy with this month.

There's another one in the possibility pipeline -- again, not the one under discussion in this thread -- but we'll see. I think I should just be happy serendipity is putting out, and not ask for double-penetration.

Yeah, embroider that one to your pillows. Words to live by, dammit.

laughing.. can't breathe...

Ned, don't worry, that ms. is one I'm going to continue revising until the end of the summer. That's my Big Show, my Secret Move.

ooray hay for ep Tay.

The book is called, in Googleproof code, F1erce Pop Songs. It's an anthology of my best short fiction, including some previously published stuff (some of which I've lightly revised), and the conceit is that it's like an album, with stories as tracks, liner notes explaining how each story came about, etc. It's going to end up clearing out my directory of unpublished-but-publishworthy material, which is ... both nice and intimidating (no longer will I be able to tell an editor, "Hey, I've got something that'll fit that," without writing something new).

Now, the cool thing is this, because this is something I've been planning on doing for years and thought I'd have to wait until I was famous in order to be able to: the "album" will be preceded by F1erce Pop Single: Lullabies for Strange Children, which sells for a dollar, includes a dollar-off coupon for the book, and consists of three stories which aren't in the book: one is short and entirely new, but shares a setting with the "Lullabies" on the album, and the other two are remixes of stories from that section (one takes the story and tells it from a different character's point of view, changing a few plot elements along the way to provide an alternate ending; the other takes the themes and names of the original story and mixes them into a completely different plot).

I just think it's ineffably cool that I'm able to get away with that.

I have no idea how to sum things up, so if you look at my blurb there and are all, "Okay, but I'm actually not sure really what sort of things are in this anthology," prod me.

I'm now co-editing an anthology for the publisher of FPS, which is odd and not something I'd intended to do until later on down the road, but it's to do with approaches to writing which are near and dear to me, so ... it just kinda happened. Which is neat.

Keep your fingers crossed on all counts, then, there are a lot of irons in the fires.

*fingers crossed*

Wait'll you see the sequel :)

(I have said too much.)

Sort of.

Hey, I got time.

If you've ever wanted to read Jesus saying "fuck" a lot, hey, I got what you need.

Yeah, so anyway, I have a different novel, neither the vampire one that originated this thread nor the self-published one. It's actually in a publisher's hands at the moment, but I'd like three or four people to read it, if anyone's interested, so that if I get a "yes, with rewrites," I'm guided by more than my sense of the story, the editor's response to the story, and the opinions of the friends who've read previous drafts. See what I mean?

This one's shorter, a 37K-word novella. Much different in style, etc., than anything else I've published except a ghost story none of you've read; it's not arranged chronologically, it's not always narrative, and the viewpoint swings around like a handheld camera. Two generations in the future, a rockstar gets billed as the Second Coming of Christ and goes on tour to end/save the world. Hilarity ensues.

This is -really- different from the other one. If you liked the other one, I can't promise you'll like this one, and vice versa. You don't have to give me any feedback beyond "I liked it, didn't like it, got off on it, did my math homework on the back," if you don't want.

Argh. If I'd just switched which book went to which publisher a year ago, at least I could be hearing "the messianic rockstar asshole market is too saturated for this to sell" instead.

I didn't set out to write a vampire book!

Possibly Tor would not have this problem, but they're Tor, that's shooting high and it takes a loooong time to hear back.

(I have my haunted house book from the summer that I'm going to send them, when I get over being all bummed.)

On the other hand, rejecting it at this stage is -faster-. At least now I know -- so much of the genre small press gives me the heebie-jeebies that I'm unlikely to want to do much there with anything I think I could eventually publish in a bigger market, so putting this book on the "it has to wait until I have an agent" pile is a kind of closure.

And at least I've got other books. The haunted house one is better in a lot of ways and more closely fits what the horror editor says they're looking for. (The vampire one, after all, isn't a horror novel so much as it's an action movie with vampires in it.)

Still, I have earned Taco Bell and the right to say "rassum frassum" a few more times.

The haunted house one, though, people can read -- but haunted houses and vampires have very different appeals :) So it's okay if you'd as soon not.

Ian, it'll be on its way in a moment.

Unrelated to that: you can track my drinking interests in the haunted house novel -- Our Hero begins the story a dyed-in-the-wool tequila fan, but by the time it ends he's going on about single-malt Scotch.

xpost -- Oh, I'm not that discouraged, just slightly frustrated.

My friend, I know the feeling.

My ideal situation would be to email the stories to an agent as I wrote them, have money deposited into my account periodically, and not know anything about where the stories went or where the money came from. But so it goes, at least my short stories have done well.