Week 7 - Waste Not, Want Not

 

Week 7 update – slowed down a bit here and there, but now I’m back on track, and back on the romance book. Having paid work and its attendant deadline threw me off for a couple of days, but I fixed it by going back to longhand in the morning. I also got some rewriting/typing done on the detective story before the internet distracted me. Looks like it’ll be the romance for the time being, I can’t say for sure how long. Plans, plots and intentions can change on a dime. Such is the life of a pantser.

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Speaking of distractions, my subconscious lobbed a doozy at me, probably as a last-ditch effort to knock me off my productive course. When the new story ideas didn’t sway me, Mr. Subconscious decided to go for broke and dump the whole shebang on me. Long story short, a long book of short stories. In other words, an anthology.

For years now I’ve made it a point to write some form of fiction every day. Best case, it would be a specific story aimed at a certain genre or market, hopefully with some kind of payment attached. Since depression and writer’s blocks often interfered with that, I decided flash pieces—everything from brief paragraphs to full stories under a thousand words—would also fill the bill. This way I could honestly say I wrote some form of fiction that day, even if I never returned to it. Writing is writing, after all, and one way or another, no writing ever goes to waste.

Some of them did lead to better things. One night I scribbled a bit of fluff about a reporter interviewing a human who’d been raised by vampires. It wasn’t very serious and ended after a couple hundred words with the reporter meeting the parents, with the (off-camera) expected result. I set it aside but didn’t quite forget about it. Over time the premise morphed in my mind into the tale of an orphaned child (female at first, later male after I discovered the TV show Supernatural) who’s taken in by a flock of vampires and grows up to work in a brothel that caters to paranormal beings. That became my erotic M/M romance Belonging, one of my best sellers. The fantasy/detective story I’m currently working on got its start when I mashed two of these random flash bits together. You can read that background info at the October 8, 2022  entry of this very blog.

I’ve got years—decades, even—of these things, scattered around in notebooks and a couple computer files. Some might someday bloom into full-grown stories or even books. The others…well, quite a few were scribbled down before bed, sometimes right before midnight, in a panicked effort to keep my daily writing habit intact. They’re not often coherent. Or clean. (For example, last week I jotted down how leprechauns come by their pots of gold. It has to do with another meaning for “pot” along with the phrase “shit a brick.” And the source of fairy dust? You don’t even want to know.) My sense of humor was shaped in my early years by Mad magazine, later by National Lampoon and Monty Python. This is the type of thing that comes out of my head when I’m tired, or desperate, or both. Most of them are unfit for human consumption, let alone development into a decent story. Or any kind of story, decent or otherwise.

But, Mr. Subconscious whispered seductively, what if you dusted off some of these piles of crap, polished ’em up a bit and passed them off as a self-published ebook of humorous short-shorts? Like Jokes for the John, but for lit majors. Most people don’t have the attention span to deal with a whole book anyway.

And instead of calling him out as a total nutjob, tired, desperate, writer’s-blocked me replied, Y’know, that’s just crazy enough to work.

So now I’ve got another side-side project. I haven’t stopped work on the detective book or the romance. The series is still in the queue somewhere. But now so is this. Any time I get blocked I’ll haul out a random notebook and see what’s in there. The bulk are going to be on a par with the leprechaun thing I alluded to a couple of paragraphs back. But there still might be some gems among the crap. If I can scrape together a hundred of the best of the worst, whip it up into an ebook and sell it for $1.99—hell, that’s less than two cents per story. If you only find one out of the batch you like, you still come out ahead. You can’t beat a deal like that with a stick.

Besides, I’ve been wanting to improve my formatting skills, and I need to learn how to make my own covers because right now I can’t afford to pay for one. This will give me something to practice on. I might even make a little money from it. No writing, or effort, ever goes to waste.

I’ll need to come up with yet another pen name, though. Variations on my real name have already been used, and I want to keep my other pen names for actual serious stuff. Damn you, Mr. Subconscious. You’ll pay for this. See y’all next week.