No, I haven't. I'm lying. I only wish I'd been on vacation, flitting around the South Pacific in my own flying boat and doing... well, whatever one does in the South Pacific in a flying boat.
Mostly I spent the last few weeks sitting on my well-padded keester writing a novel. Note that I didn't say "publishing" or "sending to an agent" or anything like that. I just like writing them; what happens to them after I'm done seems to be secondary. Oh sure, I think it'd be great to be a rich and famous author, but it's one thing to put about 130,000 words down on in Microsoft Word, and quite another to actually try to sell the thing. I may be 51 years old and I may be fairly secure emotionally, but I'm still in no hurry to start collecting rejection notices in a shoe box. Besides, I have a hard time imagining that anyone would actually pay me to read my stuff - it's hard enough to get people to read it for free.
Still, I may look into e-publishing. I don't have huge financial expectations, and I'm sure the advance for genre fiction of this sort amounts to about fifteen dollars, so I don't think e-publishing would be a major blow to my potential earnings. But it certainly sounds easier than conventional publishing, especially for a hack like me.
What genre is my novel? There are more genres today than one can shake a stick at, but I think when people say "genre fiction" today, they mean that dark romance stuff like Twilight and True Blood, romance novels retooled with vampires and werewolves. That sort of thing isn't for me - I prefer my vampires to look and act like Bela Lugosi, thank you very much, and I am openly scornful of the super-fast vampires popular these days. Watching the backwoods shit-kicker vampires in True Blood go booking off across the bayou at 150 miles per hour makes me roll my eyes, to say the least. (And while I'm the subject, why does every damned vampire in True Blood seem to own a bar or night club? How come none of them are ever shrimpers, or work on off-shore oil rigs?)
Not that I have anything modern "dark romance" novels. I have friends who enjoy them considerably, and that doesn't bother me.
Mostly I write science fiction. Among the novels I read in my formative years were Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Forever War, the Berzerker series, Tactics of Mistake, Dorsai!, and to a lesser extent World of Ptaavs and Ringworld. That's more or less what I write, though my own "house universe" that I tend to revisit over and over borrows some prehistory from the old Simulations Publications wargames Starforce and Starsoldier, and maybe a hint of Battlefleet Mars.
And the day that makes me a fifteen dollar advance, I'll be frankly surprised.
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