Following a tip from a LinkedIn forum I’ve busied my first free Saturday in months with creating an Amazon Author profile. Don’t know what good it will do me, but in for a penny as the saying goes.

What with all the intrusions of relatives, who seem to have learned the niceties of personal interaction from some obscure Porlock based branch of my Wifes family, writing has ground to a complete halt. The September deadline for ‘Darkness between the stars’ currently looks about as attainable as World peace. Gosh, is that my cynicism, I wonder where I’d put it. Unlike Douglas Adams, I don’t like missing deadlines. Even self imposed ones.

One of my problems I think, is trying to cram too much into a single volume. The market for 150,000 word niche market volumes is very restrictive, and people seem not to want that length of work any more. Especially for the kind of ‘retro’ style sci-fi I write. Yet the sheer enormity of the story demands this kind of treatment, and to do anything less would be to cheat the narrative, leaving too many loose ends. To me, the story is all that matters.

Perhaps releasing ‘Stars’ in 15,000-25,000 word episodes at a dollar ninety nine a time might work, properly reformatted for the eBook marketplace. At present ‘Sky’ runs to 148,000 and if taken as a whole, seems to ramble a bit. ‘Falling’ is a much easier read, and has a stronger sense of direction. ‘Darkness’ is currently only 30,000 words in and the story is tightening up nicely, but I can’t focus at present. Maybe I ought to backtrack and play with the original a little, release the first novella of the Cerberus series when I’ve decided upon a better ending for it and go from there. Let the narrative for ‘Darkness’ unravel and retie itself in my head before hitting the keyboard in earnest. Then let people buy the originals if they want to.

I used to think that writing original works was the hard part. Now it seems the market has changed significantly, and so must the way I work.