January Writing Contest Results

I've found more people to do the monthly writing contest with and as a result what was originally supposed to be for the summer of 2013 continues apace. Here's the breakdown of the 11,348 words I wrote for my different projects:

For starters, the single biggest block of new content was written for The Atlanta Incursion, the sequel to The God of the Wet Wood (formerly The Thing in the Woods). Around 3,700 or so words, most of which comprise a prologue in which some Atlanta gang-bangers run into something a bit more frightening than the rivals they intended to ambush. The story takes place around Georgia State University, so I'm going to need to do some exploring when the weather is warmer. The events of this story take the overall saga on a more science-fiction trail, although the overall tone is horror-based.

Next in terms of content is the fourth Wastelands novel, whose tentative title is Return.  Ironically for a series whose first tale has been described as a "boy book," most of the material I've written after the second book has focused on a female-dominated harem intrigue subplot. Irony. Around 1,500 words or so.

After that, I translated "I am the Wendigo" into Spanish in hopes of making more foreign sales. I read an article about some...dubious Kindle stories that made the author $30,000 a month at one point and one thing that stuck out was that she had them translated into German. I can't speak German, but I can speak enough Spanish that I could grind out a translation myself or (what I actually did) translate it a paragraph at a time using Google Translate and correct for mistakes, idiomatic expressions, etc. No sales of "Yo Soy El Wendigo" so far, but I did move a few in Mexico, Spain, Italy, and surprisingly the USA when I set it for free for a couple days. That was around 1,500 words there.

I also wrote another 1,000 words for a different project. Not going to say what it is--if I can't sell it to The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction under my own name, it'll go on Kindle under a pseudonym to avoid causing job problems later. Sufficient to say it fits into the "Bizarro" sub-genre and involves heavily-armed little people. Around 1,000 words.

The God of the Wet Wood saw another 1,000 words added, mostly new material from the POV of the female lead Amber. I was hoping to get it to at least 50,000 words, but I got it only halfway past 47,000. Two of the prospective markets I've found will only accept works of 60,000 words plus, while one will do shorter e-books but only print 60,000+ works. Since much of my strategy for marketing an actual book involves book signings, that simply won't do. Hopefully the critique I'm doing on 2/10 will help me find a solution.

I also wrote 780-odd words for a fourth short story featuring my supervillain protagonist Andrew Patel. I've got a cover for a four-story collection featuring my first two stories "Ubermensch" and "Needs Must" and two plotted stories further exploring the consequences of the events of those two, so now I need to write some material. :) A $3 anthology with four stories might seem a bit more credible than four individual stories for $0.99 each.

The rest of the word count consists of odds and sods, including some new material for my neglected SF novel The Cybele Incident, some material for the *seventh* Wastelands novel, and a cover letter for The God of the Wet Wood. February is looking a bit busy with graduate school and a paper I'm presenting at the University of Georgia, so I'll have my work cut out for me.