A Man! A Plan! A Canal! Panama!

Ok -- here's the plan. I've found a site that has freelance writer's job on it, and it costs $75 for a six month subscription. I can get the $75... and with some luck, I can make it successful enough to raise enough money to take care of the whole Lulu.com thing. I've even found an editor that might look through my anthology a lot cheaper than $700, I think half that since I dropped the word count down to 38K. I just cut two stories that I didn't like -- they had interesting premises (and one is going to become canon for a series), but the stories themselves just didn't seem to go anywhere. It's like talking to someone and you can feel the attention just draining away... if it was ever there. I liked the concepts, and I am going to keep them and see if I can develop them for things later on, but as far as short stories go --- nuh-uh.

One would think that short stories would be an easy thing. Between five and seven thousand words -- here's your topic and your opening sentence... go! Not really. When I write, or when I am doing that preliminary stage (often called 'goofing off at work'), I can't really confine it to just to the five to seven thousand limit. Well, not always. I do have four short stories that I think are the best ("Night Of Life", "Cry In The Woods", "Pandora's Tea Guest", and "Funnyman"), but those were an agony to get within the word count. What's worse is that the market for short stories is both drying up and tightening down. No longer can we indulge with seven thousand words. Now, five thousand is the upper limit -- flash fiction is king now (not to be confused with slash fiction). Anything that can be put onto a single page and leave room for advertisements will be dandy. Dragon magazine used to showcase some great fantasy stories... then it became a house organ, only publishing short stories from their cabal of authors they were pimping. Now, they don't even do that. A friend of mine asked me why I didn't consider Wizards Of The Coast (who now own TSR, and frankly have driven D&D into the ground) as a publisher.

"I don't trust them," I said, "I just get that feeling that if I did something with them, I'm going to get the short end of the stick in an uncomfortable place."

To wit he responded: "At least it's the short end."

White Wolf went the same way as WoTC. They had a good product, then they got greedy, then they killed the good product and now they're shipping out substandard material on all fronts. Why does the actions of White Wolf concern me? 1) I know I've put at least half of their kids through college and gave braces to the other half. 2) They brought back the story telling aspect of the game, not chain mail bikinis and hack-n-slash. 3) Their mythology (especially Vampire: The Masquerade) was original, well thought out and made sense. Their system for magic for the game Mage: The Ascension was perfect (especially the second edition, but there were a lot of first edition things I liked as well). Werewolf: The Apocalypse was OK. I really could have dealt with less 'eco-warrior' and more 'urban wolves', but again, it made sense. The only two games I didn't like were Wraith: The Oblivion (I think they missed a great opprotunity, which I am going to grab and use. The way the game was played made it interesting on paper, but having played it once, it's really impractical) and Changeling: The Dreaming (what they hell were they thinking with combining a card-collectable game [the grab for money] and a pen and paper RPG? Again, the mythology was good -- but the execution was horrible).

Sorry to drone on and on about RPGs, but they are a hobby of mine. Honestly, if I thought I could get in as a writer for White Wolf, I would do it in a heartbeat. However, the games that I loved to play are no more, and I don't like what they've done with the system now -- not so much as with the mechanics, but with their storylines and myths.

Oh, well. Back to Spooksayer, I suppose. Spooksayer managed to produce a halfway decent short story (and upon reflection, a lot of the short stories I have deal with ghosts...) that's going to be in the anthology tenatively titled Blocks Of Babble. With any luck, Blocks Of Babble will be the springboard to get me really noticed out there in publisher-land.

Almost finished with Clash Of Kings, the second book in the Songs If Fire and Ice series. If you haven't picked up this little gem yet -- do so and do so now. If I could write as half as well as George R. R. Martin does, I'd be a bestseller. Another good series to pick up is Jacqueline Carey's series: Kushiel's Dart, Kushiel's Chosen and Kushiel's Avatar, for those of you who like S&M and political intrigue with your fantasy. Both of these people have very well, thought out worlds and great stories to go along with them. Wow.

Well, that's all for now, I might chime back in with a review of the movie Troy after I get back from a friend of mine's apartment. I just hope to God that Brad Pitt didn't go commando as Achilles. [vomit] Hurglack! [/vomit].

Word Count for Spooksayer: 4,886