Two months ago I started working again at another Austin tech company with a bunch of former coworkers, so much so its just like old home’s week. They have a new software product coming out at the end of this year and I’m working on the documentation for it. Have already managed one product manual and am working on the second now, so just very busy every day. Nice to feel like I’m contributing again and getting out of the house and away from the cats.
After the initial month or so of getting used to working all day, I’m now in the rhythm again with my other projects. You may have noticed some word counts changing on various story projects. Last night I completed one, a new short story I call The Huntress. I’ve sent it out to a few people for some feedback, then I’ll clean it up, pack it into an ebook and post it on all the common ebook stores.
Storms on an Opal Sea, which I thought would be the second short story I released is still dragging along. When I updated the site graphics to pre-announce it the goal was to have it done and available by the end of January. Unfortunately, I’m just not happy with how its been coming along. I thought I could push through and finish it, but instead I let myself get distracted with the new job and before I knew it the middle of March was here with no story to share.
So I decided to get motivated again and signed up for the online Lecture Series called How to Write a Short Story: The Basics, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch from WMG Publishing. While most of the material was already known to me, she managed to wedge some new thoughts into my head on writing short stories that sunk in and made sense to me. Mainly, to just write your stories using the techniques mentioned and practice! That’s it. In every other endeavor in this world people only get better by practicing, so if you don’t practice, you can’t get better. So I decided the first idea to practice on that sounded appealing was The Huntress. Three weeks later it was done.
Now I hope to apply it to some other projects as well.
