Wednesday, June 4, 2014

It's a book.

By the end of today, I'll have 54,000 words for Ghostlander.

Which means, even if I started in on the conclusion from here, it would be a book.  I'm thinking another couple of writing sessions for the first draft.  I prefer at least 70K words, and 80K words even more.  But not much more than that.

I've noticed quite a few ebooks that aren't much more than 50K words, but that doesn't seem like a book to me.

Meanwhile, The Adventures of Burp, the Burrow Wight: A Fable for Adult Children, is probably going to be less than 10K words.  Really, it would work as an illustrated book.

Linda really likes it.  She seems to be telling everyone about it.  I told her the ending and she laughed out loud.  So far, every scene I've read to her has elicited some belly laughs.  Of course, it may just be our peculiar family humor.

"Not a children's book," she said. 

"I told you it wasn't..."

I'm not sure what to do with it.  I'll probably just throw it up online somewhere and charge .99 for it or something.  I have to find a cover to it.  I need to find what category it would fit in. 

I think I should allow myself to do that.  Write these uncategorizable books if they come to me.  Just for fun.  Cyber Flash (which was Freedy Filkins) was a lot like that.  Not sure what to categorize it as.  Written purely for my own enjoyment but I thought it came out pretty well and went ahead and published it.

Thing is, that writing for story and enjoyment unlocked Death of an Immortal for me.  At the center of Cyber Flash is a love story, and that human element made me realize that a story is about the people.

Even my regular books don't seem to fit the normal perimeters of the genres.  The Vampire Evolution Trilogy was sublisted by the publisher as "gothic" which I kind of liked.

I was trying harder to write a historical fiction, in some ways, than I was a horror when I wrote Led to the Slaughter.   The better historical horror is like that, I think.  Like Terror, by Dan Simmons which is more about the historical and human drama, with a tinge of the supernatural.

That's the nice thing about the new publishing world.  There is room for books that don't strictly meet conventions.






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