Cecilia Lansing

Necromancy Isn't Dead

It's been a tad quiet here for a while…

Let's see if I can bring this site back from the dead…

Starting full of hope and determination at the end of 2011, it didn't really ever fully get up to speed. I didn't, that is.

But I'm full of hope and determination again, starting in 2018! And missing one key ingredient: a job.

Yep, I quit my regular day job. Looking at my finances I decided I had enough of a buffer to spin it out for about a year, so I took the plunge. I realize I'm in a very lucky position to be able to do that.

Since the start of this year I've been working on writing, writing, and writing. It's been going quite well, I've written over 25.000 words. I've finally found my way around the plot for one of my long worked-on stories, making good progress. This one seems to be heading towards a short novel length. We'll see.

I've also nearly finished the second short ebook in a series I started in 2012. And finally decided on the series title for that series. In the coming days I'll re-issue the first ebook with a new title, and a few days later I'll release the second ebook. I'll post about it here when the time comes.

So, for now, that's it: I'm back and I hope to make it work this time...

John Scalzi On Bad Publishing Contracts

Recently John Scalzi has been speaking out against bad publishing contracts that have been emerging from Random House's eBook specific imprints Hydra and Alibi.

Go to this post on his website and get caught up on what the kerfuffle is all about.

In case it needs saying, I agree 100% with John here.

Rambling, and a Work In Progress Excerpt

After a week of vacation I seem to have been inspired to get back to writing a bit more seriously again. Today was a productive day, and that makes me feel good.

I'm a writer. How do I know I am, you ask? Because the act of writing makes me feel good. It's that simple.

But it's not all, of course. Part of being a writer is having other people read what you write. And hopefully like it. Or at least be moved to feel something by it. There's nothing worse than being boring, as a writer. As a person, really, but as a writer it touches on what makes you, you. And what makes you money, in the end, so it can be a real problem, being boring as a writer. Unnoticed. Forgotten.

Which is why you probably see a lot of writers trying to get attention. For their work if they're not too conceited, but sometimes for themselves. Those should probably just be ignored.

But the thing is, we don't know if you've seen our work if you don't tell us about it. So please do. Write a review, give it a rating. Comment on a blog post, or send an e-mail (mine is cecilialansing @gmail.com). The author will love you for it.

This author will even love you if you criticize her writing. Not saying mean things, mind you, but telling me what's wrong with my work will maybe even earn you more gratitude than gushing platitudes about my greatness. I already know about my greatness. Tell me how to improve! ;)

So here's me, asking for some attention for my work. The little bit below is an excerpt from one of my Works–In–Progress (WIP). Unedited, raw. So it has warts. Can you see the same ones I already spotted? Or have you spotted problems I've missed by being too close to the material? I'd love to know. Leave me a comment?

Excerpt

That is the end of chapter 6 of my novel–length work in progress. It's about the journey of a somewhat older man as he discovers the delights of kinky, sexy games with three uninhibited young women. And somewhere they end up on a sailing boat. With ropes and rigging and acres of lonely water.

So, liked it? Hated it? Problems? I'd love to get some feedback.

Writing Workspace

I've just realized I have a problem. It's very much a first-world problem, but still.

I do all of my writing on my personal computer. My desktop personal computer, although it's actually a tower and it's under my desk. But you get the picture. I don't have a laptop. It's on my list of things I need to buy, but for now it's not there yet.

So, this means that I'm pretty much confined to writing when I'm at home. Which would not be a problem if I had a good “home office” workspace set up. But I don't. Which means that whenever someone else is in my house they pretty much are able to look onto my computer screen. From the couch in front of the TV it's too far to actually read anything or see details of pictures, but the problem is more in my mind. The feeling of someone looking over my shoulder while I try to write makes it impossible to concentrate and actually put words down on the screen.

My living arrangements are such that about 40 to 50 percent of the time there's someone else in my house. They're family, but still, it's become increasingly obvious to me that this situation is interfering with my writing time.

So, I've decided I need to fix this. What's the first step? Rearrange my computer setup so that I can “shut the door” and afford myself some privacy when I want to write. This is not too hard to do, but I need to rearrange some furniture, and maybe buy some drapes or something (I have an alcove with sliding doors, but these have windows in them).

Next, maybe rethink the priority of that laptop so that I'm more mobile and can decide to just hide out in a corner of some coffee shop and write some dirty smut there. With a nice cappuccino at my elbow of course. Maybe even a muffin or some cake. Hhmmm, sounds good…

So, fellow writers, what are your writing environments like? Have any good tips, or comments? I'd love to hear from you.

March 2012 Update

It's been a bit silent here for a while. I finished a new draft on a short erotic story (actually the first in a series) a while ago, but put it aside and for some reason I haven't felt like starting up on the editing and revising process on that one. I'll let it lie a little longer.

I've also been on holiday, so I was out of the country and away from internet and my keyboard. But now I'm back, with a couple of new ideas running around in my head.

Today I found myself starting a completely different short erotic story. But the lead-up to the actual naughty bits is taking a lot longer than I planned. Not that that is by default wrong or something, but I might need to rethink the story once I get through writing down the first draft.

Anyway, still #amwriting, just not as fast as I had hoped when I started out on this adventure. But come back. I'll have something new up. Promise. Just don't know when.

Meanwhile, if you haven't already, check out my first released short story: (removed).

Progress and a Little Pricing Experiment

Been silent here for too long. The problem is that there's not really much to tell. I've been working on my stories, but it's been tough going recently. That story that wanted out is now having second thoughts and playing hard to get. I'm slogging on, but I think I'll be ripping out the guts again during my first real editing round. Ah well, so it goes.

I also bit the bullet and finally went through the whole rigmarole to get my previous short erotic story (removed) published on Smashwords. You can find it here.

As you'll see there, the price is ¢99, which is the ‘experiment’ I mentioned in the title. If you go to Amazon (US or UK) you'll see that the price there has dropped to ¢99 as well.

Yes, for a limited time, you'll be able to get my short erotic story ‘removed’ for just ¢99!

Or you could head over to the announcement post and just download a copy there (epub, mobi or pdf).

The Story That Wants Out

As I mentioned in my Grand Opening post, I had been writing a second story while editing the first, and had outlined a third that I'm planning to flesh out to novel length. So when I finally finished that first short story and threw it out via Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) (see here or get it directly from Amazon(re-issued, so no longer there)) I fully expected to dive into either one of those.

But then a completely different story invaded my mind. So I'm now writing that, first. Maybe it's because this one feels shorter than the other two on the table. I might already be addicted to the feeling of pressing the 'publish' button on KDP.

Whatever it is, I've been making good progress on this one, even though I've been having trouble staying away from the distractions on the internet. And real life issues have also taken up quite a bit of my time. But even though I've spent little time putting down the words, I think I'm already over the halfway point. And I secretly hope to have the first draft done by tonight. But then I'll need to buckle down and not get distracted by twitter, or writing entries for my website.

Let's see how far I get.