I built a breathing space for myself.
- Lesson 5 of How to Write Short Stories is done, with one exception that I’ll get to in a second
- HollysWritingClasses.com is almost done and out of beta, and the parts of it that aren’t are NOT things I can work on or help with
- My mailing list is on autopilot for a couple of weeks because for the time being, folks have heard enough from me
- The email RPG works as-is, and I need to let the complete overhaul I want to do to make it cooler cook in the back of my head for a while
- I have more questions to answer for my Patreon folks, but the last (ten-minute) video took four hours to make, so I need a better way to do those
So I have TWO pieces of shorter fiction that get ALL of my attention for the next four days. I’m figuring I can put in an easy six hours a day and have both of these done and published by the end of the workday on Friday.
First, of course, is the novella Vipers’ Nest. And I whimper when I say this, but the title is going to be Vipers’ Nest when it goes live, because ALL my promo for it, all my Coming Next text in the other books, all the stuff that you don’t want to have to go back and revise and reprint JUST to change two words, is Vipers’ Nest.
I’ve made good progress on this already, and barring finding some big wreckage reported by a bug hunter that I just haven’t hit yet, it could go live as early as today or tomorrow.
The second story is currently a novelette, and would technically be a reprint. I found A Few Good Men on my hard drive in an ancient AmiPro copy. This was a story I wrote on request for the anthology Women at War, edited by Lois McMaster Bujold.
I pulled it out, cleaned all the coding out of it, and read it. And was really disappointed. It had some funny bits in it, but it wasn’t… strong.
FORTUNATELY (said without sarcasm), I needed a wrecked story to demonstrate short story revision for How To Write Short Stories, and it’s a helluva lot more instructive to fix a genuinely broken story than it is to try to write a broken one on purpose and then fix that as a demo.
So this is the cover I did for the broken story students read in HTWSS week four. I don’t know if I’ll use the same cover (or even the same title) once I’ve revised the story.
This story gets a complete tear-down revision with red pen and notebook notes, a complete rewrite, a type-in revision, a content edit, a revision to content edit, AND a bug-hunt. I don’t think this story will be complete this week to go on sale…
But the tear-down revision, red-pen edit, and scans of notebook notes should be done this week. Which means they’ll be available for How to Write Short Stories students. Which in this case is the important part.
On to writing. Nothing but fiction for a whole Week! Woot!
Leave a Reply