I’m going to start posting my progress on “Winter’s Unexpected Arrival” here.  This is mostly a mechanism to encourage me to write.  My goal is to finish a beta version of WUA by the end of October.  I’ll also be experimenting with progress meters.  The first one is:

My goal for October is to get a beta draft of “Winters’ Unexpected Arrival” written and out to the beta readers.  I have a 750 word synopsis written, so the arc of the story is well established.  One of the challenges will be to keep it under 7500 words.  The other challenge will be to write it in a style that I haven’t tried yet.  More on this later…

Just finished up the beta version of “Death’s Harp has One String”. Which is two days early to hit my (self imposed) end-of-the-month deadline. It only took a week to do, but then the story was already written as the prologue to Tactics and I wanted to polish it, it wasn’t that difficult to come in ahead of the deadline. And its short. Only about 3500 words. Which is the shortest story I’ve ever been able to produce. Let’s see how the beta readers judge it…

My friend Chris H. and I started (re-)watching the first year of the Venture Brothers last night and I must say that I found them just as good in rerun as they were originally.  Perhaps this is due to being more familiar with the characters and seeing the story arcs with the knowledge of where they are going.

I was struck by the thought that I wouldn’t enjoy the Venture Brothers anywhere near as much without having experienced many of the TV shows, comic books, movies and other cultural phenomenan that, lets face it, are pretty mediocre.  For example, I know I enjoyed Men in Tights more because I had seen, and didn’t particularly care for, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Are there things you enjoy more because they are based on things that you didn’t enjoy that much?

While I was in the shower this morning I had an inspiration for a new title for the “Angst Gryphon” short story that I have been working on.  It has a rather pulpy sensibility to it, which I like.  So without further ado I introduce Angst Gryphon’s debut story title:  “Death’s Harp has One String”

Now that I have a number of short storys from loitering on my disk I thought I would start putting them ‘out there’.  In order to facilitate this I find myself doing a bit of market research, the upshot of which is that I created a wiki page to store notes and links.  This page will probably grow with my desperation time.  So stay tuned.

In an attempt to get another short story pumped out by the end of the month (more on why I am trying to do this later) I’ve decided to polish up the old “Angst Griffin”, or “Angst Gryphon” as it is called now, story and give a good polish.  “Angst Griffin” is one of my oldest stories, dating back to the early ’90s.  It is certainly the shortest of them, currently at about 3000 words, but it has grown, having originally been 1400 words.  But that seems typical for me.

I’ve (finally!) finished my first polish draft the “The Unmodified Man” (another story in the Chronicles from the Nexus).  I’d planned on making it under 7500 words this time, but it came out to a bit over 11,500 words.  Ah well, I’m just going to have say that I don’t know how to write a short story.  I (think I) know how to write a story.  They just come out however long they’re going to come out.

Time to start my next story.