I got a message from someone today, who friended me on Facebook, saying that they found my
website via
Twitter and that they decided to buy a copy of
The Magic of Eyri (through
Amazon) after reading about it. Neat, huh? I can confirm that someone did buy a copy on Amazon today because my ranking dropped from 2 million something all the way down to 200 thousand something.
They went on to say that they like supporting "mid-western creative types" such as myself. Very cool. This is part of the reason I started using Twitter in the first place: cross promotion and free adversiting. You just never know and I figure it can't hurt any.
In other writing news, I mailed out one of my short stories once again. I'm giving
Slow and Steady, my steam punk retelling of the Tortise and the Hare, another chance. i sent it to one of the bigger story magazines--let's hope they like this one. They didn't accept the last story I sent them, but that was over 10,000 words and I think that didn't help any ( I have been told, the shorter the better). This one is barely 3,800 words so it is not only considerably shorter but it'd be cheaper for them to buy (if they took it, I'd maybe get something around 5 or 6 cents a word).
I've also started doing research for the novel I want to write next month for National Novel Writing Month. I'm taking a break from the world of Eyri and doing something different. Yeah, I still need to finish the second
Magic of Eyri book but I'd like to have something different to send out to agents (something that I haven't self-published). All I'll say about this next book is that it mixes detective stuff with monsters with a sort of urban fantasy/qusi-steam punk setting (along with my usual sense of humor). Say that five times fast.
Anyway, I've been doing research on vampires, werewolves and other neato stuff. Did you know that there is an old myth that a dead werewolf would come back as a vampire? Crazy.
And to get an idea of what others have done with this genre, I checked out Kim Harrison's
Dead Witch Walking from the library. I met Kim at ConClave last year when were on panels together, she's a very nice person. I asked around at this year's ConClave about how people do research and I was told that reading what others have done is a good idea, not to copy it but to see what they do with things such as vampires, zombies, etc. This is also why I ordered
Hardboiled Cthulhu from Elder Signs Press (and why I'll reread all my
Hellboy books again).
I'm still figuring things out though, for example today I made a list of what kind of technology I want my 'world' to have. World building can be fun--but it can also be a big headache. But it is mostly fun. Mostly.