Writerly Ways

[cornerofmadness]

Taming the wild bunny. Boy, do I need help with that. It’s arguably a good problem to have, a field of wild plot bunnies running through your head. I do have a plethora right now. You can tune to those here and here. There is that little problem of too much of a good thing is bad.

evil_little_dog has suggested using a random number generator to calm those bunnies of mine. I could do that but the truth is, sometimes its hard to drown out the particularly ill-behaved bunny who is all about ME ME ME. They know how to scream.

By rights, my nano is going to be my 1930s demon hunters. Really it NEEDS to be. The novella is out there and now is the time to follow it up. I know I can do this but the problem is, it’s the softest, tamest and shyest of the bunnies right now. Gideon and Madog or Reko and Nine are arguably much more vocal at the moment. And none of them are giving up more than random scenes, some of which I’ve already written.

So how do you manage having too many ideas at once?

On a completely unrelated note, here’s an interesting article on reviews and do they matter. For anyone following along in the publishing world in the last couple of months, reviews have caused a huge flap. First there were the authors caught creating sock puppets on Amazon and Goodreads to bump up their reviews and star ratings. Even before this, I thought it would be bad form for me to use my everyday Goodreads (same user name as my blog) to give jana_denardo’s novella a good rating. I rated a few anthologies I’ve been in and even then it didn’t feel right and I stopped doing that even though I mostly talked more about the other authors. It never even occurred to me to create sock puppets to inflate my novella’s rating.

Then there came the whole buying reviews thing. This article decries reviewers getting anything. Yes and no. If they are employed by a company to do a review then I see no harm (I’ve known people who have been paid reviewers) but NOT if they are paying for good reviews only which is the latest flap. Hey for X number of dollars I can buy a dozen rave reviews for my novel. Hmm, yeah, no, that’s not right either.

But this part of the dust up is the one that pisses me off the most, people purposely driving down ratings because, well who the hell knows why. In the erotica world, especially m/m we see A LOT of this. You get the religious types who think it’s their duty to denigrate the erotic. You get the prejudice types who live to destroy anything GLBT positive and so on and so forth. It’s not uncommon in the m/m arena to see one person supposedly reading and reviewing 50+ books in a very short period of time, not saying anything substantive about the book (we’ll assume they didn’t read it) and honestly, there isn’t anything you can do about it.

As for reviews, they weigh very lightly on when I buy a book but I do look at them. If I see the same complaint in every review, I might consider getting that book at the library rather than purchasing it. As an author, I try hard no to look at reviews but I haven’t gotten very skilled. Yes a bad review hurts. It also hurts when you give out free copies for an honest review and you don’t get any but that’s still better than the person who runs around giving 1 star because they don’t like your subject matter. Trolls suck.

But in better news, thanks again to marlex, catw00man &zippitgood for editing through chapter one of my and evil_little_dog’s story Ties that Bind. We’ve revamped it (Okay ELD did most the work this time) and if you want to see it again, let us know. And thanks to bay115 and winters_queen for looking over Blood Red Roulette (Bay, did I send you ch 2?). All your work is very much appreciated guys. If anyone wants on (or off) the original fiction filter, let me know.

Yearly Word Count-

148780 / 175000 words. 85% done!

Kept Tears -

52170 / 60000 words. 87% done!

Comments

[bay115.livejournal.com]

With plot bunnies I tend to also write random scenes if my muses are loud enough, but yeah I know how it feels deciding which work to focus on.

And yes got ch2 of your vampire story.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

it can be very frustrating

and good, i thought so

[catw00man.livejournal.com]

Hey, so glad we could be of help! Actually I was thinking about your characters the other day, wondering how that was going and what happened next. LOL

I would love to see how it's coming along, but I'll warn you now I probably won't be able to get to it for a bit. I'm leaving town for the weekend and I'm trying to crank out Big Bang words right now. But yes, I would like to see it again. :-)

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thanks. that's good to know.

we can send it now or hold it until the crazies are over (you know, in January)

[zippitgood.livejournal.com]

I'd also like to get a look at the revised chapter too. I'm also curious to see what happens next and learn more about the world.

(Kept meaning to comment earlier but the past week or so has been hectic.)

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thanks. good to know. right now i've been too swamped to really revise much. haven't even looked at ch 2. will send it when life stops being nuts

[zippitgood.livejournal.com]

No worries and there's no rush. This time of year is always insane and only going to get more so in the coming months. I completely understand as I'm dealing with many different things going on at once.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

definitely will. The next time someone hears me say I'll do two research projects in one year they have permission to slap sense into me