Mystery Fiction With A Supernatural Twist

I realize that this post is somewhat long in coming, and not very timely, but I just haven’t felt like I had anything worth saying.  Not that NaNo isn’t a worthwhile topic, but the fact that I got my ass handed to me again was something of a foregone conclusion, at least in my own mind, and so not really worth mentioning all on its own.

I hate bringing this up, because talking about a story I’m working on seems to be the surest way to sabotage it, but I’m working on something brand new.  I don’t want to say too much about it – there’s a reason the title is Jinx, after all – but I will say that I just hit the 10,000 word mark, which is pretty cool.  For me, anyway.

And here are a couple of articles from Brian Keene’s website: How to Avoid Bad Markets and Bad!HWA is Bad (That’s not the real title, just so you know).  The second article won’t be of much interest to people who don’t write horror, but the first one has a lot of good advice for aspiring writers of any genre, and is definitely worth the read.  Oh, and I found these linked on Ian’s blog, so thanks, Ian, for digging up all the good stuff.

It didn’t feel right putting up a post without talking about writing, so here’s a post about writing.

When it comes to the mystery novel I was working on, it turns out that the third time is not the charm.  It usually is for me, but apparently not this time.  I think I’ve figured out what I need to do to make it work, but I’ve also got a different idea that I’d like to try, and have stupidly signed up for NaNo again this year – despite the fact that I get my ass handed to me every year – so the mystery is going to be on hold until December 1st.  But that’s okay, because, while I haven’t been working on the mystery, I’ve actually managed to finish two short stories.  One I wrote from scratch in about a week and a half, and it’s already out on submission.  The other had been sitting on my hard drive since July, and it will be going out either today or tomorrow, as soon as I figure out the most suitable place to send it.

I don’t really know why I bother to do NaNo, except that it’s fun to be involved in something so big.  My inner editor is extremely critical and never shuts up, which makes it next to impossible for me to churn out the amount of words needed to finish in time.  But so far I have three friends who’ve signed up for it, at least one of whom is almost guaranteed to kick my ass, and so I’ll continue with my annual tradition of beating my head against the wall for the sake of fun.  Reading that back, it occurs to me that I seem to have a bit of a masochistic streak.  Tiff is going to have a ball with that comment, I can see it now…

And, speaking of Tiff…  I normally wouldn’t dream of mentioning the names of one of my beta readers in a public forum.  Not because I don’t appreciate their hard work, and not because I don’t think credit should be given where it’s due.  It’s because, in a world where every writer serious about their craft would kill to find a good reader, doing so is akin to throwing that friend into shark-infested waters and then dumping chum on their head.  But, in a total of three days over the past week, Tiff has edited – with a fine-tooth comb, I might add – both of those short stories I finished, which total 13,000 words.  That’s a lot of line editing in a short amount of time, and I wouldn’t have made the deadline for the first story without her help, so I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks.  I <3 you, Editing Wench.