Plannin’
I should have part two of The Ballad Of I Know Damn Right ready to post by either early this morning or tomorrow some time. It will be another long piece, close to 3 k, and the whole story will be in 10 parts. I’m going to try and post at least one part per week — two if I can find the time to polish. I’m working on a schedule where I am simultaneously posting several stories. Serializing every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I’m planning on doing a novella called The Woman Who Hitch Hiked With Cats as the Wednesday piece (by the time I get the five existing chapters up, I should be finished with the final five), and I haven’t made a decision on what the Friday story will be yet. I might use it as a grab bag thing — full shorter works or additional parts of the main two stories if it works out that way.
If you think this is something of a self-administered kick in the ass, you may well be right.
See, I disagree that the only way to make a career of writing is to follow the old path of sending submissions to magazines and trusting to the whims, tastes and moods of editors and their bosses. I think that’s a dying paradigm. The only carrot it holds out now is that’s the only sure fire way of getting paid to write short fiction.
I think that the ‘net is the new way to make a living as a writer, and — more importantly — a name. Blogs like this are a cheap, ultra-fast and extremely reliable content distribution system for individual writers.
I believe in my writing. Not that it’s the be all and end all, just that it’s entertaining and emotionally engaging. That there is an audience for it.
I want that audience to read it, first and foremost.
To get paid, I’ll try a number of different things. I’ll present collected versions in dead tree format with nicely designed covers, illustrations and etc. I’ll offer my freelance services to the readers of this blog and their various relations. The first thing I’ll probably do is set up a simple pay-pal tip jar. If you like something you read here, and want to thank me in pragmatic fashion, kick a buck into the tip jar. I’m going to ask my web-savvier friends how to go about setting this up.
What I don’t want to do is spam this blog up with ads. I have nothing against folks who have ads on their site, and give ‘em the more-power thumbs up. But to me it’s an aesthetic decision. I think they’re ugly.
