Oops, I Did It Again

After a chat with a friend from my writing group at this year's AnachroCon, I went and changed The God of the Wet Wood back to The Thing in the Woods. Although the title is rather generic-sounding, there was the danger that due to the rapid growth of "monster erotica" (so much that I actually found a small press willing to publish it now), somebody would think a book combining "god" and "wet wood" was something rather raunchy and not, you know, the teen Lovecraftian horror novel that it actually is.

Oh well. My writing group is going to go over the whole manuscript tomorrow night and maybe they'll come up with some ideas for a better title. One group member suggested I call the novel "the rough beast" (an allusion to Yeats' "The Second Coming," my favorite poem), but the title doesn't really fit well with what the monster actually is.

One reason I picked The Thing in the Woods is that the phrase comes up in the text of the novel in a significant way (not going to say anything here due to spoilers). Any new title would need to be similarly relevant to the text.

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.

New Title for "The Thing In The Woods"

Here's an update on my primary writing project, the teen Lovecraftian horror novel The Thing In The Woods. When I brought the cover letter to my writing group for critique, pretty much everybody agreed that the title is lame. Since this is something I've had my doubts about for awhile now, this wasn't something I argued about.

One of the group members suggested I do a search for quotes from Shakespeare and use one of those as the title. After all, how does Something Wicked This Way Comes (an allusion to Macbeth) compare to The Devil in the Carnival?

Well, I couldn't find any relevant Shakespeare quotes, nor could I find any from Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, or H.P. Lovecraft (those would be best of all) I felt were appropriate. So I decided to come up with a new title based on the subject matter.

So behold, The God of the Wet Wood. The phrase "the wet wood" comes up in the novel itself, so it's appropriate.

Of course, the writing group is going to critique the entire novel Monday, so that might change.