The last few weeks, I've gotten my schedule into enough order that I'm again writing roughly fifteen hours a week. I'm hoping to get up to my peak writing rate of 20-25 hours a week. This is generally enough to have a new chapter of Too Much Love available every Friday morning if that's the only thing I work on. But, there's a catch.
I made a promise to my wife at the beginning of 2018 that I would find a way to make money with my writing that year or spend less time on it in favor of some more profitable hobby. With the end of tax season, the subject has come up again and I promised that I would have something available on Amazon by the end of July and to release five short pieces by the end of the year.
The plan is to get back up to peak writing output and to intersperse new chapters of Too Much Love with shorter pieces every other week. I plan to publish all of these new, shorter pieces to SOL at the same time that they go out to the Zon. My goal is to find new writers by expanding to a new market, not to monetize my existing readership.
There are a few stumbling-blocks that have kept me from publishing until now. First, I don't write to genre very well. There are no Navy SEALs or alpha male FBI agents in my stories. Similarly, anyone who's been following Too Much Love knows that my billionionaires aren't cut from the same mold as Christian Grey (even when I play with the idea that they might be.)
The other problem of course is that I have a certain verbosity that tends to turn cute little stories about newly-minted billionaires playing Dungeons & Dragons with lingerie models and turn them into 2,000+ page epics about globe-spanning uberfamilies and their effect on humanity's sexual ethos. I need to write some pieces in the 30-50 page range.
The first piece I'm working on is based around Jesse Stone and is meant to be readable as a stand-alone story, but after that, there are any number of directions I can go. I have more Stone stories, a possible story set in New Rome. and settings I haven't even touched yet - two involving superpowers set in the 1980s and 1990s, one possibly in the LitRPG genre.
I've got until the end of August to finish the second short story, so I thought I'd throw open to the floor what readers here would like to see written next? One of the above? Something related to one of the story's I've already written? Within the confines of the above (30-50 pages, able to be read stand-alone,) I'm open to suggestions.