I had a chance to sit down and do some math, and my future’s looking a little rosier than I originally thought. If I’m guesstimating my take-home pay from the new job correctly, I won’t need to put in as many additional freelancing hours as I expected, so it shouldn’t be quite so difficult to make time for writing, editing and publishing. These things will take a little longer, but they’ll still get done. Hooray!
Also, I started a short story this weekend. Actually, I started it in my head about a week ago, after posting the following on my Facebook author page:
I have these recurring dreams about an amusement park. It’s in a remote location down a scarcely-traveled highway riddled with various obstacles, nestled deep in the woods, and there’s always something vaguely otherworldly about the place. The otherworldly elements change from dream to dream, but the park is always the same, laid out the same way, with the same rides and the same people making up the staff. These dreams are always so vivid and specific that I always wake up from them trying to remember if this is an actual place my parents took me to when I was a kid, but as far as I know it’s totally a product of my imagination.
Last night I had another dream about the park, but in this dream the park had closed down and all of the rides had been removed. The building at the front with the ticket counters still stood and had been turned into a museum about the park, and the surrounding area was turned into a nature preserve. The museum part contained weird artifacts, like mummified fairy corpses and shrunken heads. The abandoned grounds were crawling with tourists and former staff, lamenting the park’s closing and sharing nostalgic stories about past visits there. It was really kind of heartbreaking.
I just wish I could remember the name of the park — it has a specific name which is the same in every dream, but I’ve been wracking my brain all day and can’t recall it. I really want to set a story there.
It had been percolating all week, and on Saturday I gave in to the urge to start writing it. I’m already about 2,5oo words in, and I expect it to come out at around 15,000 (all of my short stories are either flash fic under 500 words, or novelettes over 10,000 — I never seem to land in between, for some reason). It’s turning out to be a bit of a mash-up between the dream and other spooky things that have been eating my brain lately, including some creepy pasta (Candle Cove, in particular) and the Slender Man mythos.
It shouldn’t take too long to finish, after which I plan to release it free with a preview of Dominion in the back. Of course, you can read it before everyone else if you sign up to my mailing list.
Yes, I have a mailing list now. More on that in a later post.
Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve just written (as opposed to editing), and it always amazes me how much happier I am when I’m writing. Think maybe that’s a good sign that I need to take more control of steering my life toward doing it full-time? Well, that’s the plan. It’s going to be a long, tough road to get there, but I’m confident that I will get there, eventually. I just need to be patient and not let myself keep getting knocked off course.
0 thoughts on “Good Things”