Tuesday Update

Last weekend I got some good writing done, but this week was mostly rewriting and editing and prepping a book for publication.

"The Curse of Scattershale Gulch" is successfully published on both Amazon and Smashwords, but it will be a while before it reaches all the other sites, so I'm going to hold off on promoting it until then.

Besides, I am unhappy with the result. The cover I worked so hard on, and tested at multiple sizes, looks like crap on both Amazon and Smashwords, after they ran their own compression to do the thumbnails. So a lesson learned, just because a jpeg shrinks and compresses well when done right, doesn't mean it's going to compress well with whatever tool online retailers use. I have a few more things to test, and the cover template still needs a lot of work anyway...

So that's a learning experience.

In the meantime, when I look at my 59,238 active writing projects (okay, okay ... it just seems like that many), I see they are swapping lengths with me again. I'm beginning to wonder if Old Paint is really a novel, or just a novella. It seems to want to simplify rather than go deeper, and maybe that's why it keeps stalling. In the meantime my novella Devil In A Blue Bustle (which is 20k and seems three quarters done) has some plot holes that could benefit from some fun subplots.

I'm thinking Bustle might be a better follow up to Have Gun, Will Play, too. It has a closer tone, in terms of the development of the relationship. Also more opportunities for Mick to make a fool of himself. (Old Paint, though, has opportunities for Casey to make a fool of herself, and maybe would be a better third book anyway.) Still, unless one of those subplots really takes off, Bustle will be a short novel.

So part of this week's goal will be to pull that out and brainstorm to see what will work with it. I might get started on it right away, but I think I'll mostly save it for next month, while I continue with short fiction for this month.

Tomorrow we have another installment of Character Wednesday, with an interview with Laura Lond about a court jester with much more to him than jokes.