Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

well, I'm gonna follow the Stephen King method from On Writing where he says to take a couple days off then start on something else, then after a few weeks circle back around to your finished work so you can read it "fresh"

then after that, send it out to a few friends to see if they like it (target audience type people)

then try to publish

just finished a short story today based on a dream I had the other night:

A fashion designer tries to cause the apocalypse in order to sell a line of clothing.

I'm calling it Haute KILL-ture, I'm also playing around with the notion of calling it CoCo Chernobyl.

After a first draft, an edit, a rewrite, a read-through and a final revision, my novel Greenhouse Effect was completed last week.

My wife is currently reading it, as well as a friend of mine with a Kindle (easy to send someone a copy to read when you don't need to use the paper) and giving me a preliminary round of notes (typos i missed, phrases/paragraphs that sound wonky, etc) so I can polish it further and then have a few other people (more target-audience-types, and a few english professors) give it a read before i call it COMPLETE and focus all my efforts on publishing.

The initial feedback is pretty positive, but it's tough to gauge a true reaction from somebody that knows you...

got my first real criticisms...

some stuff i disagreed with completely, and other stuff i definitely took to heart and revised.

it was kinda tough to get feedback because for an instant, you think they're almost attacking your baby, but then you realize they are just trying to make it better

of course, everyone has a different idea of what "better" is and you have to find the balance between incorporating notes and staying true to your vision.

I've written a couple short stories lately that I'm pretty pleased with and am gonna try shopping around considering the success I had getting "The Dead Hate the Living" published.

First up, I wrote a story about a guy who can hear the sound of people's lives 'ticking' away. It propels him into a mental institution at a young age and leads him to gambling on people's lives in a hospital in order to make a living. I'm calling that one "Tick Tock Man" for the moment at least.

Then, I have a story called, "Let the Games Begin" about two old friends and former champions of some sort of race or event that are sitting around, discussing the old days. But something seems off, especially the way these two men seem to do EVERYTHING together.

Then, I have another story that I just finished today and will need some editing but it came straight from a dream and I love the way it plays out. A couple of roommates head out to the hottest club in town to pick up chicks, but when they get there, they hate it. They get depressed and are ready to give up when someone in the VIP Lounge invites them to a different club, one that promises to be much, much better. The security to get in is tight and one of the guys actually gets turned away because he doesn't seem that excited. When the other guy gets in, he's STOKED because it is even better than he imagined...then the illusion starts to fall away and he sees that it's not a party, but a frenzy. the people in this club are prisoners and captives, whose energy and emotions get fed on by a horribly inhuman monster and it's on its way for its nightly feeding. I'm calling it "Last Call"
there are some cool images in this one that just stuck in my brain from my dream and though they might not all make 100% sense, it just adds to the surreal, dreamlike quality of the story and makes it (to me) all the more awesome.

Trying to put the finishing touches on a couple of stories:

In one, a pair of young men looking for a fun night out get lured to a nightclub that turns out to be the lair for some ancient evil.

In the other, I've done another riff on my "fashion designer destroys the world" idea. This time, it takes place after the nuclear holocaust and it is quite a bit zanier. The first time I attempted to tackle this idea, I played it dead-straight. This time, I went with fashion-themed booby-traps, supermodel death squads, and genetically engineered make-up-puffer-monsters. I'm trying to get the word-count on this one down and tighten the story up because I think I've got something pretty special and different here that could be interesting to some magazines. I'm calling this one "Chanel Number Uranium-235" (which is a riff on Chanel No. 5 perfume and Uranium-235 used in atomic bombs).

Sounds great man.

I just finished my second draft of my first book, an anthology of short stories. Letting a few people proof it now.

And then with the start of the new year I'm going to start editing my first novel. I'm not looking forward to it. I'm going to have to change large chunks of my story and I'm sure I'm going to completely change some of my characters