Author: Richard Freeborn (Page 12 of 14)

So, I looked at the calendar yesterday, and realized the plan to post my February update in early March was so late, it makes more sense to do a double update. Well, it did to me.

Starting with the updates, the story I mentioned in the last post was accepted by WMG Publishing for their anthology Promise in the Gold, which will be published later this year. Additionally, the paperback version of Thieves in the Temple is available on Amazon, and I published the Portals collection under the title Tales From the Puzzle Store in early March. No paperback version as yet, but stay tuned.

One of the learning items from putting together Tales From the Puzzle Store has been Books2Read. They are part of Draft2Digital, and provide you with a single link that references all the online stores where your books are available. You’ll see some changes on the other pages of this site in the next few weeks as I implement those links, and a page about the other collections planned for this year. I’m also looking at working with Payhip and Book Funnel so you can buy directly from this site without going through any of the big retailers. 

I’ve continued using the beta for Aeon Timeline 3, including using it to map out a longer term series project that could easily run to six or more books, although it will probably be later this year, or early 2022 before I get to start on those.  

I’ve done quite a bit of research and thinking about the Thieves in the Temple and its successors, and how they should be branded. Going forward, the plan is to use a sub-title A Jacob and Miriam Novel. Of course that may change by the time Death at a Wedding comes out. Needless to say, those dates have slid a little, so more when there’s news to share on that front.

This past week I nearly screwed up.

I wrote a short story for an anthology with a deadline of February 14^th – and no, it wasn’t a romance :).

I had a couple of other projects with deadlines on the 14^th, and for once focused on one at a time. My usual approach has been to work on everything at once, and we all know how that tends to work out.

By Saturday evening I had the story under control, and estimated I needed another five hundred words or so to finish it. Gauging the number of words to the end is something that just happened when I did the story a week challenge last year. I’ve been within a couple of hundred words in those estimates and a quick burst of writing on Sunday morning got me over the finish line and on the upper side of the estimate.

I read through the story, sorted out spelling and punctuation and ended up with just over 2,500 words. I transferred it into proper manuscript format, checked the submission guidelines. 

And crap!

The minimum submission length was 3,000 words. Somewhere in my head I recalled the minimum as 2,000.

I’d kicked around two or three other ideas for this anthology none of which had enough structure in my mind to pull three thousand words together in a few hours.

Did I mention I’d also promised to grill steaks for a Valentine’s dinner?

There was no point in submitting the story as it was – automatic rejection, so, I printed a hard copy of the story, sat down with the dogs on either side, ready to offer advice, and looked at what I’d written. As I read through I didn’t try to edit and restructure the story or replace word order. I tried to really put myself in the head of my main character, think about what she would see, smell, hear, feel, and touch. The five senses that add depth and and richness to the descriptions of where she is and what’s happening.

I think it was less than an hour later that I took the notes I’d scribbled over the margins and between lines, updated the manuscript and realized I now had over 3,000 words.

Yes, you can overthink the editing process, but in this case, editing wasn’t changing the way the story was written. It was adding depth to hopefully help my reader stay connected to the story. 

If you’d asked me two weeks ago if I could do that, I would have said no. 

Now I know I can do that with a story

I’ll let you know what happens.

Technical issues on this site prevented updates during the remainder of January. I spent some time with the iPower support team and they tell me the issue is resolved, although I’m still seeing some odd behavior on the site.

As a result of the technical issues the updates I had planned for January are now pushed to February which is already pretty crowded.

There was no progress on the paperback version of Thieves in the Temple. It requires a block of dedicated time in Affinity Photo and to be honest I’ve had more fun with Death at a Wedding and writing three of the five short stories for the Portals Collection which will be published either later in February or early March. I wrote just over 20,000 words in January, the most in a month since April 2020, so I’m quite pleased with that progress and just need to keep it up for the rest of 2021!

I also laid out my 2021 publishing plan in January. At the moment it’s in an Excel spreadsheet but I will be moving it to the new version of Aeon Timeline as part of my version 3 beta testing. The new mind map option in Aeon 3 looks to be very powerful. I have some ideas on some non-standard uses for it, and will let you know how it works out.

About a month ago, Dean Wesley Smith announced on his blog that he was starting a publishing challenge: publish 70 pieces of his own works – written and edited in the next year to coincide with his 70^th birthday. A couple of weeks after that, he issued a challenge to the rest of us: publish 52 pieces of our own works in 2021. As a partial rebuttal to the potential naysayers, Dean asked the rhetorical question for those who completed the short story challenge – how many of those 52 stories have you published?

I completed the challenge: 52 stories in 52 weeks, and I’ve been reasonably diligent in getting them out to magazine editors. Not so diligent at getting them up online. Dean’s question could have been directed right at me.

So.

Challenge accepted!

Of course there’s more to putting a story online than just converting to ePub or mobi. There’s covers, copy, categories, and pricing!

The timing is excellent because with Thieves in the Temple so close, these are all areas where I need to become more proficient. Although trying to find cover art is nearly as much a time-sink as doom-scrolling through the news.

I’ll keep everyone updated on progress in the monthly recaps, and yes, I know I owe you the November recap. 

Stay tuned.

This past weekend there was a Bookbub promotion for the Jack Higgins book The Violent Enemy. I’ve been reading Jack Higgins since before the wrote The Eagle had landed, and while in recent years I haven’t followed his new books as faithfully as I used to, there’s always a comfortable feeling when I start one of his books. That same feeling you get when you sit down with an old friend after a long time since seeing them.

The Violent Enemy isn’t a recent book. If I recall, it was written in the late 1960’s, and the references to the life experiences of the characters set it in the timeline. It’s not a long novel, maybe 45,000 to 50,000 words, but I read it during the course of Sunday afternoon and evening.

Dean Wesley Smith recommends studying Stage 4 writers – those who’ve been writing for several decades, and who are still publishing best sellers today – writers like Nora Roberts, Stephen King, and John Grisham. 

I was close to the end of The Violent Enemy when the scene shifted to a coastal marsh for the final chapter. Jack Higgins used, I think two sentences to set the stage for the action to come, and in those two sentences, I was there in the damp and mist. It bears mentioning that when the coastal marsh was introduced earlier in the book, there was a more detailed description, but it took just those two sentences to pull me right back in.

Jack Higgins is right there with the other Stage 4 writers, and along with Robert Ludlum, was one of the early influencers in making me want to write.

If I’d known then, what I know now . . . But isn’t that a refrain we all have at some point in our lives.