Off to work I go...

The longer I'm in the writing business, the more I see how much hard work it takes to stay on top of things. If you're indie published, you are running your own company and you have a dozen hats to wear. Marketing, Cover Art, Scheduling, Editing, Social Networking, etc. etc. etc.

And then there's fixing the occasional computer glitch (IT Department). Ugh. I won't go into the gory details of the fight I had with Word yesterday.

I have a feeling that even if I could stay at home full time, there still wouldn't be enough hours in the day. But it's a fun life. I'm not complaining. Much.

It's just that what has dawned on me recently is that you can end up using all the business tasks you have to get done to fall into that nasty writer habit of NOT writing. Avoiding your WIP. Procrastination. Writer's block. Whatever name you give it.

And that's not a good thing when writing for a living is your goal(!). In fact it's scarier than The Walking Dead. (Had to throw in a Halloween twist.)

But I've found a solution for that dilemma. At least for its current incarnation. It's Dean Wesley Smith's Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing.  

Dean Wesley Smith's has a resume as long as my arm. Probably as long as his arm (he looks a lot bigger than me). He's been an editor, a publisher. He's written comic books, the Star Trek books, and over 90 novels. This man knows how to write fast. (Oh, he's also the husband of the fabulous Kristine Kathryn Rusch.)

His recommended method is controversial and contrary to most advise I've heard. In his chapters on Rewriting, he says to write without revising and send out your work or self-publish it, and go on to the next project. Say what??? No revising??? Well, he means his definition of revising. You can revise, but it has to be in "creative voice." You can't critique yourself like a high school English teacher and expect to come up with something new and different, he says. In a weird kind of way, it makes sense.

But what I learned the most about myself from his post is that I'm a cycler. I do go back and "fix things," as he calls it, and add new stuff as I think of it. And that has gotten me working on my new WIP. It's gotten me writing again after being off for more than a month. This week I wrote almost 7,000 words. Just in time for NaNo.

So thank you, Dean Wesley Smith! Right now, I think I owe you my sanity. If you're a writer, check out his posts and see what you think. If you're a reader, he's got a ton of short stories available.

Now excuse me, I've got to go write. :)

The Idea for "The Clever Detective" Series

Cleverest of Them All is the third book in a series I’ve dubbed “The Clever Detective,” which is the same title as the first book. Some readers have wondered about that name, so I thought I’d explain it.

The first story came about when my then blog sister Nicky Salcedo invited the members of the Petit Fours and Hot Tamales blog group to write a contemporized fairy tale. Since I like both romance and mysteries stories, I decided to combine the genres in my yarn.

While searching for a fable to base my story on, I discovered lists of fairy tales with names like “The Clever Little Tailor,” or “The Clever Tinker,” or “Clever Hans.”

These titles evoked memories from my childhood of stories about a poor man who was challenged by a king to perform some impossible task such as find a pot of gold, kill a bear, or slay a dragon. When the hero performed the task by reason of his wit, he was rewarded with the King’s beautiful daughter’s hand in marriage.

So I did a spin on this idea.

Instead of a tailor or tinker, I decided on a hard-boiled detective. A female hard-boiled detective. The King’s dilemma was that his son (a.k.a. the Handsome Prince) had gone missing. The hard-boiled female detective’s challenge was to find him.

Thus was born Stacey Alexander.

Once Stacey found Prince Chad in the first story, I realized the adventures had to continue, so I followed with Clever is as Clever Does and now the third book, which is novella length (the equivalent of about 70 printed pages) Cleverest of Them All.

In this story, Chad gets a taste of Stacey’s world, though that doesn’t work out so well for either of them. You can check them all out on Amazon or Smashwords.

Happy Reading!
Linsey