Flying fists of gravity manipulation! (WIP Wednesday)

More inspiration courtesy the
amazing Rafael Gallur.

Work continues apace.

When I first built Lightweight, it was meant to be a serialized story. I would deliver a chapter every month to six weeks and then collect them into book form as I worked my way through a story arc. I produced ten stories this way which became the books Lightweight: Senior Year and Lightweight: Black Death. Each of those volumes collected five stories and together they formed the first year of Lightweight's career.

The third book Lightweight: Beyond followed the same five inter-linked story structure, but it never took on serialized form. This caused a few changes in the storytelling, but I felt it lacked the flow of the first two books. Some of that might have been the vast change in setting, but I think some of that was the loss of the serial flow.

I am currently looking at new ways to serialize Lightweight for audiences. The sixteenth chapter is now finished and picks back up with Kevin and will set the Lightweight saga off in a new direction. The seventeenth chapter is already mostly written during a tough Nanowrimo run in 2016 that saw me abandon that project for another. This left a version of chapter sixteen that will never see print as I realized I needed to take a fresh approach to the book going in.

My plan at the moment is for the new collected volume to be at least six chapters long, but I often let Lightweight flow at its own pace. Whatever the case, the collected edition likely won't see the light of day until sometime early in 2019. Don't worry though. Once I've determined a strong way (or ways) to serialize it, I will start advertising several months in advance of that launch. That being said, I want to make sure to have at least close to the entirety of this volume done before I consider moving on.

My urban fantasy project has slowed a bit as I try to work out a snag in the plot made by character development changes. This one has absolutely no set timetable, so I will continue to work on it slowly as it turns to a backup project against the primary one.

With each chapter of Lightweight working as a standalone or a part of a whole, my plan is to stagger my work on it with work on other projects. One is the planned continuance (and eventual collection) of Quadrant.

The other I showed a piece of inspiration for a few weeks back. It is a new series of old school pulp tales featuring a solo hero and his merry band of misfit sidekicks. While that sounds a bit like Doc Savage, Shadow or The Avenger, I promise this masked men will be entirely different. For now, I will only give a name.

Rey Diablo.

More in the near future, but for now, happy reading and happy writing!

Detectives, dark magic and quarterly fiction (Kickstart the Week 61)

After a nasty stomach bug, I'm getting off to my week a bit late, but I feel this project is worth a mention even if it is already Tuesday.

The occult and detective fiction have been linked pretty much since the origins of detectives in fiction. (Thanks, Edgar Allan Poe!) But it isn't as often that the concept of the occult detective gets played up in fiction the way it once was. Sure, Harry Dresden and Anita Blake technically fit the bill, but they never come with the sense of impending dread one usually thinks about when the two come together.

Occult Detective Quarterly Presents is a new outlet for the detectives of the supernatural. With several creators already lined up for the first issue, the book looks to clock in at a pretty decent page count as well. Plus, it will carry full illustrations for each story, always a fun way to raise the sense of foreboding horror!

Check it out on Kickstarter and help make this new series a reality!

Post-NaNoWrimo, pre-2018 shenanigans! (WIP Wednesday)

It was a crazy November. I wrote the first two-thirds of my new urban fantasy novel, the first book in a series I plan to call The Graymalkin Chronicles. It's been interesting to drop traditional super-heroics for this one, even if my character does have a decidedly superhero origin. Like many characters, Xander Graymalkin's origins were from short stories and comic pitches I wrote back in the 90s while still in high school. And like Lightweight before him, he's vastly changed since that origin. I'm still very excited for this tale to see the light of the day, but my plans are to hold off on publication of most of my work until the second half of next year. I will likely also shop the series around to a few publishers as well.

That move has been a long time coming, but with the closure of Metahuman Press, it feels like the right time to find others to publish most of my works. My hope is to start moving away from self-publishing on all my writing outside two core series.

Those series are Quadrant, which I will talk about more down the line and Lightweight. As I showed off yesterday across social media and on this blog, the next chapters of Lightweight have started as my new short story project. I'll be writing each chapter as a standalone, just as I did with previous volumes. I will likely alternate those stories with other shorts as I go along, but I am hoping to prep a new Lightweight by that aforementioned second half of next year.

I also quietly completed the third story in The Second Life of D.B. Cooper series. This one takes place way later in the continuity of Coop than the previous stories, but does build upon the first story as published in the Pen & Cape Society project, The Good Fight 2: Villains. I'll have more information on the project once I've confirmed a home for it, but I loved coming back to Coop after a couple years away.

Today's image is taken from the Graymalkin board on my Pinterest. It features one of the creatures that will make their presence known in that upcoming book, as drawn by a talented artist named Abigail L. Dela Cruz. Check out her great Tumblr.

I just made the list!

One thing I always do as I set out to write a new project, especially a novel length one, is a playlist of music to serve as inspiration for my writing. I usually frame this around the feeling of the novel, but with this new project, I'm specifically tailoring two playlists around each of the lead characters.

Soul singer Kehlani is not just a feature on the playlist, but
another source picture in my succubus image folder. 

I've kept no secret about my succubus co-lead of the new novel, so it will be her playlist I share with you here first. It's all conveniently framed up on Spotify for your enjoyment if you have your own succubus-based novel to write (which I'm sure you all do.) Alternately, give it a listen and maybe you'll find a few clues about the character of Aisha as she slowly takes shape in my head.

Succubi and sucky jobs

This image of Suicide Girl Ginary is currently
the placeholder image in my head for one of
the two leads in my November project.
Image copyright Suicide Girls.

It's been a strange couple of weeks. I've in the midst of my final days at my job of the last three years. It's one I have never been totally passionate about, but in recent months I have come to realize the culture of that employer was nothing but poisonous. Thankfully I had a second job in place that could easily become a full time job. Next week, I'll leave behind overnight shifts and the back and issues given me by concrete floors and move into a comfortable job at a local bookstore. While entering the retail field full time in November isn't the best idea ever, I look forward to the free time it will open as I start to rebuild my writing schedule.

As I mentioned previously, I'm setting up for NaNoWriMo right now. With the new job starting on Halloween, I'll have free time open just in time to get working on fifty thousand words for the month of November.

But the move to one job with far more satisfaction in it than two jobs with one being a soul-sucking miasma should free up a lot more time for everything. I hope to use the next month's novel as the springboard for regular writing projects. I have a few ideas already percolating for the days after the novel, but I'm taking baby steps right now.

Anyone interested in joining me for some novel writing in November, can become my writing buddy at the site. My screen name might even be a clue to an upcoming project I have in mind.

In the mean time, I'll be continuing to develop my female lead for the new book, a reluctant succubus in a world far too easy for her to find prey.

What are you currently doing to develop your novel before November? Let me know in the comments or on social media?

Prep in my step

As I wrap up edits on one project, I am also deep into preparation mode for my next personal writing project. National Novel Writing Month begins on November 1st and I plan on using it as motivation to start my next full length writing project.

While I have done a little bit of short story work in the last few weeks, I haven't taken the time to write anything of significant length since summer. But Nanowrimo offers me a chance to fix that and I will be hard at work on a new project, one that takes me out of my usual super wheel house. 

I'm sure I will speak about this project more as I start actually put word to screen, but this new work will be my first foray into urban fantasy, a genre with its own traits but one at the edge of super powered fiction already. It should come as no surprise that I have a supernatural tinted character created decades ago that I think would be a perfect fit for the genre, but the transition from aged super-concept to another genre offers a few challenges.

Setting has proved the easiest. I made the decision to set the first novel in my own neck of the woods. Eastern Iowa has a few weird bits of supernatural history. Coupled with a location most people outside the state don't realize is a city of a quarter million and I have a fascinating place to drop my leads. 

This is a great piece by Genzoman, but I blame Darkstalkers for the sudden
need to give every succubus wings.

From there I've been working on lore built around various secret societies and ancient fears. Succubi, incubi, Lilith, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Knights Templar are a few of the touchstones that will be featured in the upcoming work. While I plan to make the story my own, I also don't want to trounce all over standing legend. As a writer, I often get annoyed when someone uses a concept in name only. My goal is to introduce these concepts in a way both true to their "history" and interesting to new readers. That means research though, so I'm deep into that as I write this. 

Prep can become its own evil however, so I specifically opened a window of time for myself to do it in. I want to have a good idea where I'm going with the new novel ahead of November and what it will feature, though not enough that I cannot let the characters surprise me as they go. That is the joy of writing for me and I don't like the research to get in the way when I'm barreling through 50,000 words in thirty days.