Let The Evil Laughter Begin!

I wanted to make this its own chapter. It is a moment I've long awaited - the debut battle for the premier middle school supervillain team, The Inscrutable Machine!

Chapter Six

Another Interruption Over

This will be short, because I need to fall on my face.

It's time to clean up Quite Contrary and start thinking about publishing. I got through the first editing pass on about a quarter of it, then went into writing starvation. So I wrote the next chapter of The Inscrutable Machine in a fit of madness.

Enjoy.

I will fall on my face now.

Back To The Machine!

Sometimes a writer stops and goes 'Where did those five thousand words come from?' I was worried that interrupting The Inscrutable Machine to write a short story would kill my mojo. Apparently not.

Here's Chapter Three!

And now I leave you to it. I'm getting that post-writing collapse, and I have a terrible headache and blah blah blah. Chapter 4 is already plotted out. I could theoretically begin writing it tomorrow.

Above The Clouds

So, I got into the last Kindle All Stars anthology, and I want to get into this one coming up. It's young adult, which is right up my alley. Alas, I got all inspired and the story I wrote is too long. Oops.

But that means I can post it here!

It's a Xeno Romeo and Juliet, set in steampunk. I'm really proud of it, and I hope everyone enjoys. I intend to publish it as a free sample of my work in the near future.

Oh

And yeah, also I finished chapter two.

I'm not needing as much in the way of breaks between chapters as I used to. Not sure what that means and if it will persist.

You Can't Scrute The Machine!

Oh, writing feels SO GOOD. Okay, long break over. It ended the way writing breaks should, with me desperately writing something because my brain was about to explode and I couldn't sleep at night for the ideas.

Here, have Chapter One!

In case I haven't mentioned it fifty times, this is the beginning of The Inscrutable Machine, a book about a middle school girl supervillain. Quite Contrary filled me with a burning passion, but it was dark. It kept getting darker, and by the end it just wrung me completely dry of darkness for awhile. I'm going to try to keep The Inscrutable Machine light and frothy.

Yeah, good luck with that.

As an interesting note, I kept feeling that I wasn't ready to start writing it. I had too many unanswered questions about the story. Then I absolutely had to write, so I started it. After that first page, everything began falling into line. I understood the context, and was able to finish my outlines and plan for what comes next. That layered 'theory, then practice, then more theory, then more practice' approach is pretty common in my life. Didn't expect to see it in writing.

Quite Contrary INDEED

So, I spent the last several days in a haze of madness, unable to think about anything but writing. As a result, I am proud to have new links for you!

Chapter 8: Rose Red
Chapter 9: Pizza In Purgatory
Chapter 10: Her Only Friend Isn't Her Wolf

This ends part II of the book, and since there's like 3 or 4 more parts I'm starting to wonder if the book will be rather long. It's Mary's fault. I love writing her.

Also, I'm in negotiation for Wild Children's cover art. By far the best thing I've ever written, I'm strongly looking forward to publishing it soon.

So, what AM I writing now?

This blog has been slightly less useful to me than my DA account, because I have been unable to post any of my in-progress roughs. What good is a writer's blog if you don't know anything about what he's writing?

This post is an experiment in fixing that problem!

My current project is a book entitled 'Quite Contrary'. It follows the adventures of a nine year old girl named Mary. As always seems to happen to everyone who gets lost, she has an amazing and magical and unbelievable story to tell. Unfortunately for her, that story is Little Red Riding Hood. Unfortunately for Little Red Riding Hood, Mary Stuart fell into it.

But you can't get the flavor of a book from descriptions. How about some rough drafts of the chapters so far?

Chapter 1, Mary, A Rat, A Wolf, And An Unfortunate Change Of Clothes
Chapter 2, Here There Be Fairy Tales
Chapter 3, Kickin' It In Fairyland
Chapter 4, Girl Meets Girl Canceled On Account Of Wolf
Chapter 5, Blondes Who Hunt Trolls
Chapter 6, Mary Is Briefly Happy
Chapter 7, Freaky Viking Romance And A Fast Exit

The chapters don't have actual titles, but I felt some way to differentiate them might be nice