I’m trying to write more fiction.  In THE OFFICIAL ALPHABETICAL LIST OF AUTHOR SUCCESS, I’m somewhere between U and S, with aspirations of N or M level success.

Honestly, if I ever write something and sell enough of it to take my wife on a dinner date to the Olive Garden, I’ll consider that a success.  If my sales cover not just the food but two glasses of wine as well, I will have exceeded my wildest dreams.

Larry is right about a lot of things, writing is work.  I have a day job, one that I really like, and have no desire to quit.  (To be honest, I think if most of you knew exactly what I do for my day job, you’d be sorely tempted to quit your job and do what I do.)

But between this blog and my day job, Grammarly has me at about 20,000 words per month.  The idea of coming home and diligently slamming out another 20,000 words in my after-hours isn’t all that appealing.

Also, I fucking suck.  I live my life in the Dunning-Kruger trough and I read a lot.

I write, I read what I write, I hate what I wrote because it doesn’t measure up to what I feel like I should be able to write, I delete it, get discouraged, and don’t try again for another week or two.

I am absolutely convinced that there is no way I can put out 50,000 words of this shit, and even if I did, nobody would want to read it anyway.

I just have a few ideas in my head for stories that appeal to me that I’d like to share.

My top three are as follows:

I have an idea for a supernatural zombie story that is heavily inspired by the book Dracula.  It takes place during the Civil War in Louisiana.  The villain is a bokor (evil voodoo shaman) who is an escaped slave.  He is reanimating the dead soldiers to terrorize the local townfolk and plantation owners in revenge for his enslavement.  The group that has to stop him is a mixed bag, a Confederate Officer, a wounded Union Officer, a house slave who is also a voodoo shaman, but a good one, and a few others I haven’t quite figured out.  The house slave shaman would be the Van Helsing of the group.  There is plenty of room for friction and character development within the group, all while fighting zombies with Civil War era weaponry.

A story about a metallurgical consultant who discovers in a failure analysis that the failure wasn’t incidental but deliberate.  The villain is using science to sabotage aircraft in ways law enforcement cannot detect before it happens.  I got really focused on the technical with this one and the villain sort of sucked.  I had an idea recently for a new motivation that I think is better and I might go back to this one again.  I was inspired heavily by a terrible movie (based on a book I’ve never read but should) called No Highway in the Sky.  It’s notable only because it’s the only story I know of that has a metallurgist as the hero.

The third, and most recent is based on a Tweet thread by author Travis Corcoran about fast-rotating Brown Dwarfs.  I have no plot but have been enjoying some world-building while practicing writing horribly shitty dialog.

So… fuck it.

I’m going to start posting drafts because otherwise, this shit will never see the light of day.