Well, despite the chaos, I hit my 50K goal for “A Recipe for Disaster” making it an official Camp Nanowrimo winner. What does this mean for a novella whose target word count was 25-30K? Frankly, that I have another actual novel on my hands. Sigh. This unexpected novel is also by far the most bizarre one I’ve written, but I’ve decided to just wait and see how revisions go and let it be however long or short it insists on. Granted, I’m hoping to lose at least 10K cutting out the stream of consciousness notes and there’s a random scene from “The Claypit Banti” at the end of it to fill it out (hold out hope for a new chapters soon my Holy Worlds readers) but I still think this will end up pretty much a chapter book/middle grade novel. I’m still hoping to release it this fall.
I’ve really enjoyed drafting again and this has been a positive experience, so I’m planning to do this all over again in August. At the beginning of the year, I took part in the Taleist Self-publishing survey and have been enjoying reading the results. One of the things I learned was statistically how much better Romance does selling on kindle than Fantasy as a genre. Basically, on average Romance writers made well above average, while Fantasy writers well below.
Like every author, I have a variety of brand new story ideas of many different sorts, but this got me thinking. I’m not the sort of person to pick a genre purely for the sake of sales, but picking which ideas to draft or edit first has always been a challenge for me. If indie publishing and kindle books are favoring Romance stories, did I have any ideas that featured a romance sitting around? Could I use this statistical information to inspire myself to finish sooner in hopes the book would sell particularly well? Looking through my lists of previous ideas, I found four that I could categorize as YA Romance, and after rereading those and glancing over the notes and scenes I had for each, I picked one to draft for August Camp Nanowrimo and possibly future indie publication.
I’m hoping to report in next years survey all my success.
But until the month of August, I hope to manage to get some other stuff done first. Like working on Sylvania. The Sylvanian housing crisis is still a hard reality of life and all this summer Nanowrimo chaos hasn’t been good for the Sylvania. All I’ve had time to do is stack cardboard boxes up on each other for temporary housing for a little over half the animals. I did get a small green shelf second hand to make into a couple homes as well.
The trouble is the upstairs is short on shelving in general. I have books stacked on the floor and stacks of boxes. Fortunately, I got a couple of old bedrails to turn into shelves from my parents, but I need to buy cinder blocks to set them up before I can finally get the books off the floor. I’m hoping after that I can perhaps manage something similar for the rest of Sylvania.
However, despite all logic to the contrary, I just couldn’t resist using my birthday money for this exceedingly cute elephant family. As a child, my brother and had two elephant children we’d often pretend to be, Timbo and Blotto. I think we might have gotten the idea of being elephant children from the Babar books. So, letting other residents wait, I have excited settled the Elephant family into their new quarters.
The boy and girl are of course Timbo and Blotto, and the father’s green jacket makes him a perfect Babar, the mother Celeste (I think that’s the right name). I haven’t named the three babies yet. The youngest is just a flocked animal that isn’t a Sylvanian, but fits too nicely for me not to include him.
Also, because cats are awesome, here is Caramel who thinks she lives here. She’s the landlord’s cat next door (no idea what they call her, but I name all cats I see regularly), but since their relatives used to live here, I think she used to be allowed indoors. Every time I go out to work on the yard she thinks I’ve arrived to pet her.
