Office Hours, The Secrets and more…

Issue 104 of The Secrets went out today. I’d hoped to have it out sooner but just as I was ready to send it, power went out here and my local DSL provider was not working well with computers. It was very odd that none of the machines I had in the house could get online, but my iPod Touch could hit the web and do my email for me. Good thing, too, but weird.

Classes

I teach writing classes here and there. Last evening I gave a presentation titled 21 Days to a Novel to a packed house at the Changing Hands bookstore here in Mesa/Tempe, Arizona. The two hours flew for me—and for the participants, from what they said. I’m looking forward to doing more classes through the store.

21 Days is one of seven different writing seminars I’ll be offering at Gencon Indy just over a week from now. If you’re going to be at the convention, please take a look at the Writer’s track of programs. There’s a lot of great writers there offering advice and information. It’s a great place to learn, especially when you get blown out in the first round of a tournament.

I’ll also be teaching an internet course for Arizona State University’s Piper Writer’s Studio. The class will last for 8 weeks and is titled Writing Fiction in Genres. The course will involve analyzing genre fiction for core common elements that appeal to readers, then working on delivering those same key elements. Emphasis on characterization and plotting will drive most of the exercises.

Office Hours in Second Life

Tomorrow night (Wednesday, 6 August 2008) I’ll be in Second Life at Third Life Books at 6 PM Pacific/game time. The agenda is open, but I should have some news on new projects and the whole iPhone/Touch fiction release. We can also talk about what I’m doing with Such A Nice Girl.

Such A Nice Girl is the first of many stories I’ll be serializing here, to my website, for free. This is how it’s going to work. The stories will come in roughly 1,000 word chunks, three times a week. Most stories will run ten to twelve pieces. They’ll be available here for your reading pleasure until the next story starts its run. I’ll make the old stories available in the store for the same price as the rest of my fiction.

This story involves Trick Molloy, a character who made his debut in the Wizards, Inc. anthology edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman. Because of contracts, I can’t make that first story available until November, nor the other two that precede Such A Nice Girl until a year after they see print. The world of these stories is gritty and nasty, full of magic in an urban setting. Molloy is an ex-cop who works as a bouncer in a strip club. The setting, language, situations and violence are the reason for an adult content warning.

I really think that the web and electronic devices have already changed the way we read. Writers are going to have to change how they write to synch up with this new mode of communication. Writing serialized fiction like this is just one way to take a step in that direction.

I want to thank Kat Klaybourne for the great art for the project. She’s been doing all my graphics for the fiction in the store, turning out eye-catching images that really fit the work.

If you like the story, please direct your friends to it. If you want to more fiction done this way, I invite you to hit the Stormwolf Store and make a purchase. I regularly review what sells, so you can vote with your dollars for stories and universes you’d like to see sequels to and more work in. (Plus, voting with your dollars buys me the time I need to write these stories.) If this experiment works here, more authors will do it, and we can bring publishing at least into the 20th century.

See you in Second Life, or at Gencon, or right here tomorrow, for Such A Nice Girl>/b> Part Two.