Chapter three of Wilhan should be up tonight. Thank you all who have emailed about it.
I've been working on the prequel to flesh out some skinny chapters I didn't like, and that is coming along nicely.
I'm still getting email from people who like Rolly. One of the perks for writing a DiD story I guess. I have outlined a sequel, something new for me to do since I usually just start vomiting words out onto the page and see where my ideas take me. I want to put some work into this one and I have a bunch of long vomit stories to post so don't hold your breath. Posting involves long, long hours of proof reading, editing, and rewriting for me. It might be a year or two before you read about Rolly again.
That brings me to things that have been bothring me lately. I can't seem to be original. I came up with an idea for the new Rolly story, then I took the name of a city -- from one of the people who emailed me -- to use as the setting, looked it up and found out that there is a female County Attorny General there just like in my story idea. Can I use that now? Can I have a coincidentally real person have nasty lesbian sex on another planet. Maybe if she wasn't a prosecutor I would try.
I watched a Nova special about Ulfberht swords last night and it parallels a story I wrote last spring. The part that is different is the part I actually pulled from history. It's the crap I made up that is the same as the history I didn't know about.
Same story different coincidence ... I more or less put my finger on a map and found an island to use as a geographical template (Isle of Mann) for an island in the story. Village goes here, harbor goes there, that sort of thing makes writing easier for me so that I don't have a horse gallop a five hundred miles without stopping. Last week while doing a search for the Wilhan story I find out that there is a real Viking burial on the same site where I buried my viking family. I didn't even know Vikings had been to the Isle of Mann when I wrote the story.
I had another original idea that I was proud of, and then I read an older SOL story a few days ago with almost the exact same scene.
I suppose that there are only so many ways to do things and we have been inundated with probably tens of thousands of storylines watching TV and movies our whole lives. A lot of Rolly was written that way. I pulled from Deadwood-HBO, Fist Full of Dollars, Lonesome Dove, The Cowboys, and who knows what else. I'm starting to think that maybe I'm a robot full of programmed memories and ideas, and it bothers me a little. I should never have stopped wearing my aluminum-foil lined hats.
A final note, not only for myself but for other authors as well. We make mistakes. Half the words I type are mispelled because I'm a crappy typist even when I'm not writing half asleep or half loaded, so when you see me or any other author put down 'than' instead of 'then', or 'two' instead of 'too' once or twice out of a hundred times the words are used in a story correctly, we really don't need a lecture on what the words mean and the difference between them. Just say in the email, "You fucked up on page two, paragaph three, sentence six, than should be then." Or just cut and paste the sentence into the email.
Here is the prefered way to email me:
Love the story, you are better than Hemmingway, here are your fuck ups.
ch 6. Johnny sit a brick = shit
ch 7. Suzy has to tits = two
ch 8. Than we found out that Denver is higher then Seatle = then,than
BTW I would love to send you money and nekid pictures of my smokin hot girlfriend. Would that be OK?
For those of you who are minimalists, this will do:
:)
FUs
ch 6. Johnny sit a brick = shit
ch 7. Suzy has to tits = two
ch 8. Than we found out that Denver is higher then Seatle = then,than
$$$ (o)(o) ?