~~ "She has so many aliases, you'd think she was a spy!" ~~

Thursday, April 21, 2011

What I’m Working On, April 2011 edition


Not quite a Me!Me!, but various authors* have been listing, or list on a regular basis, the projects they’re working on, and since I find it fascinating, I thought I’d do the same. (You might not find it fascinating. Let me know.) Perhaps not regularly (I can’t quite seem to shoehorn concepts like regular and schedule into my life), but occasionally. Or, at least, now.

Out of the Frying Pan, aka the manuscript that will not die. Status: effing tweaking. An editor asked for tweaks. Teresa and I discuss, get some tweaks done, then get sucked into other projects with deadlines and payments and whatnot; lather, rinse, repeat. We’re so close, too. One scene she needs to write, and I need to knit it all together, and then it’s outta here.

Blackwood House. Status: manuscript cleanup/upload prep. Time to get this sweet paranormal romance off my hard drive and out into the world. Yes, I wrote a sweet romance. Nearly killed me, but I did it. Since it was rejected by the only market it fit into (since it’s only 50K), there it languished, occasionally surfacing to meekly inquire whether I was going to add those half-thought-out subplots so it could become A Real Book. Well, the answer is clearly “no,” because I have way too many new books to write to spend time going backwards—and because it works as it is. It’s been through copyediting; next step is dealing with those edits and getting the manuscript ready to upload as an ebook. Oh, and get possible cover photos to Phae for the cover design. Then, after it’s up for sale, I’ll work on the POD version. (That may not get far until July when I take a publishing workshop that will cover the process.)

Untitled story for mystery contest. Status: idea obtained. (Actually, the idea was obtained last year before the contest, but I never got around to writing it.) Mystery story set in New England, due May 1.

Untitled Custom Erotica Source stories. Status: accepted assignment. Two related 3K stories due end of May. I wrote a novella for this customer previously, and these stories will be in the same vein, so they should be easy enough.

Work-for-Hire fantasy story proposals. Status: percolating. I turned in the first story and want to get a couple more proposals off to the editor, plus there’s another universe I’d love to write in, so I want to write some proposals up for that, too. I’d like to have those out by early May.

Epubbed stories. Status: ongoing. I’ve got something like 25 up now, and I’m selling an average of 3 stories a day via Amazon (I haven’t tallied Barnes & Noble or Smashwords closely). I think I have about 80 total that I have the erights for, so I’m gonna keep putting ‘em up until I run out and have to write new ones (although I do have some unpublished stories that have run their course of pro markets and will thus be next in the queue). I also want to start bundling them into e-collections and POD collections. But right now, I have five stories in progress to get up in the next 1–2 weeks.

There’s more—there’s always more—but this is what’s on my plate for the next few weeks.

Are we having fun yet?!

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*My favorite is Seanan McGuire, who makes me head hurt in a groovy and awestruck way. Scary and inspiring in equal measure. CE Murphy has posted some doozies, too, and Laura Anne Gilman is pretty amazing.

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