It’s been an exciting week for me. I logged into my Yahoo! Voices account on Friday to check how many hits I had. I’ve been watching for a few weeks, looking forward to the day when I hit the 30,000 hits mark but it’s been inching up very slowly. Well, I logged in and saw 38,000 plus! (Over 58,000 at this point.) What happened? They must have featured something more of mine. I went to the Yahoo! Voices page and clicked on Creative Writing to see which one had been featured. Imagine my surprise to find TWO of my most recent entries enjoying top building on the main page!
My first ten pages of Devolution, that I had submitted as a short story, has the biggest picture and my villanelle poem, Regrets: A Confessional Villanelle, has the second slot. I finally got smart last night and added a link to the end of that piece of Devolution to the continuation of the story. Hopefully that will double up any more hits I get. It’s not a heck of a lot of money but every little bit helps with my debt reduction plan. What’s more exciting, though, is just seeing the hits climb, knowing that people are reading my writing. I do wish more people would leave comments telling me what they think, but I suppose that could go either way if they did. Best to just enjoy the fact that they’re reading.
The other exciting thing this week has been thinking about starting a new novel. Planning a new piece of writing is almost as good as actually writing it. I’ve started reading Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass, again, and it’s making me think about turning my short story, Biomalware, into a novel. One of the things he says is that a story has to be plausible. It could happen in real life. Well, as I was telling a member of our writer’s group about it Thursday night, his eyes got wider and he said, “That is fiction, isn’t it?” A good sign, I’d say. My writer’s group members are the ones who originally said it should be a novel rather than just a short story. The Donald Maass book is helping me make connections and plan layers. I’m thinking I might actually write a bit of an outline.
Some people outline and some people prefer to just forge ahead, leave the complexity to their subconscious. I’ve been the latter most of the time. When I do outline I have a tendency to lose interest in the story. But if I’m going to do a really full size novel with lots of complexity, I think I may need an outline. A road map, of sorts. I’ll probably try to keep it simple and fluid. I think I’m getting a writer’s high. 🙂
Melora Johnson's Muse 