As my current project nears completion, I've been thinking about what to do next. I have notes for the next few novels in the series, and one of them would be a good candidate. However, the part of my brain responsible for such things says I'm going to write a screenplay. What do I know about writing a screenplay?
Most of the editing is wrapping up on the second novel. The scenes have been laid out and characters assessed. The last part will be adding weather to the story. "Shouldn't that already be done?" you ask. Some bits, perhaps, but now the real weather work begins.
The first draft is complete and now the technical part starts. I've gotten a little of that done, but will have to wait until the end of the semester to really start working. It shouldn't take too long though; I learned a lot from the first novel.
Though my work schedule has been tight, aggravated by winter weather delays, I've found a little time to work on the follow-up to Cordell's Rebellion. There are only a couple of scenes to complete and the first draft will be done. The excitement is building.
One of the problems of print-on-demand publishing is that you don't get all the support that comes with a publisher-driven launch. Even though my novel is through the Barnes and Noble Press, I'm still responsible for the initial promotion. That made it more exciting when I got my first customer review on the Barnes and Noble website.
As part of my writing, and because I'm a data person, I always wonder about the structure of language. In grad school I had to write a simple search engine (similar to Google) and learned about taking documents apart and determining word frequencies. Just recently, though, I learned about a neat concept called Zipf's Law and how it relates to, among other things, word distribution in both written works and entire languages.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the website of a writers' group to which I used to belong (from 1996 to about 2007). They still seem to be meeting, but one detail surprised me. They no longer critique poetry in the group. I know good reasons why that is not good.
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I am starting to see a pattern. Fall of 2017 was almost as bad. In my day job, I teach software development and databases. This fall, one of my courses, the technology changed while I was teaching it. All of my preparations, my examples and so forth were invalid. This really cut into my writing time.
Walked I willy-nilly on winding way when
I saw something settled in the silt at the side
a beverage bottle blindly be-thrown
by littering lout with no love for the land
a wastrel without the wisdom of the world
blighting the beauty of my beloved byways
earning the enchantment the elves can employ
to punish this person polluting the paths
a curse coming to condemn the un-cautious culprit
to terrors and tremors and ingrown toenails
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The changes to the layout of the novel seemed to work, at least as far as the title page and the other front matter. The actual content of the book still had an issue. This was going to take some exploration. I think it may now be fixed.
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