"Series Traps"

The Read ...

Simon R. Green seems to be falling into a major series trap with the recent Drood book, The Spy Who Haunted Me -- overwriting.  Like including more information than is needed to get a point across.  Still, I'm a Simon R. Green fan because he gives me enough laughs and chuckles to be worth $8.00.

Example:  "The Armourer looked more than a little uncomfortable at the thought of his mother (the Matriarch) getting it on with the Independent Agent ..."  [The IA is the guy who set up the contest at the core of the book and provides the villain.  The Matriarch is Drood's grandmother.  The Armourer is his uncle.]

The ponderous style had my internal editor swinging it's red pencil right and left.  The chapters are long and without breaks which can be annoying when you read in snatches.  His many adverbs annoyed me more.  I also didn't notice much character growth, other than his family is a bigger pain in the arse than most. 

There's a new one out -- giving us the tale of what happens after the matriarch is killed.  Eddie Drood is a suspect, of course.  I'll be buying it in spite of the comments above -- if it's mass paperback.

Web Business ...

When reading a link given by Patricia Stoltey on e-publishing to Amazon and Smashwords,  a terrible idea jumped into my head.  Should I publish the "sample" e-stories I was going to put on my someday-site for free?  Would you get terribly angry, put out, etc -- if you found you paid $.50 for something you could've gotten for free?

Maybe I can publish the short story ... and have Renna gossip about everyone for free, including (maybe especially), Mariah.  Renna is an aging Half-Elven who fought at Mariah's side during the Rebellion (that saved the Half-Elven from genocide 400 years ago from Dark Solstice days).

Maybe I can have my snickerdoodle and eat it too.

Progress ...

Not much that I can see.  

Demons -- got the pages changed after I re-added the prologue showing the demons plotting.  After going through it again, it felt funny that the demon-honcho didn't make an appearance until the last three chapters of the book.

Also took the plunge.  I sending it out for rejection to agents, aka as querying agents.  This will be a time consuming process since I'm googling and reading individual agents to try to match the kinds of fantasy I write.  Of course, with some poor agents with stellar reputations, I'll throw caution to the winds and just query.  Still, I'll only be sending out one or two at a time.

Promoting the Half-Elven is proving to be a bigger pain than I even dreaded.  My writing time is going to be spent talking to the guy who might help me build my site.

The rest of my stuff is just fermenting.  I have a couple critiques to do.  Also need to check if I've sent the fantasy critiquers something.

Trivia ...

After a barren five years or so, our 30-foot apricots produced 10 apricots.   About time it did something besides shade our bedroom window.