Tuesday 4 October 2011

How I Write . . . Riffing off the Greats

I'm delighted to announce a pro sale today, to Lovecraft E-zine. They pay $50 a story and my story was on the dot a thousand words, so I'm counting it. Talking of counting, that makes my thirteenth pro sale. This makes me happy.

And the sale has led to a new wheeze me. I take inspiration from the Cthulu Mythos quite a bit. My stories might be quite distinct from the mythos, but I hope to follow the tone. So, why not do the same for another of my favourites. Yes, Philip K. Dick. I've the volumes of his collected short stories. So I'm going to be having a little stab at following in his footsteps. I'm rather excited about this. What about you guys? Do you take inspiration from a particular author in this way?

In other news-- novels. Yep, too long for me. But I have come up with another plan of attack. Novellas and novelettes. I have a couple in my unfinished files, and hopefully I can get a least a couple finished this month. The idea is to gradually expand my span of control. It could work. Maybe. Gotta keep trying.

14 comments:

  1. Congratulations (and 13 pro sales - wow). I suppose we all take inspiration from other writers along the way, and I'm sure I have a dozen-hundred times, but I don't set out to.

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  2. Yahoo! Congrats on the sale. Speaking of novelettes, my W1S1 Week#38 was one of those monsters, and I'm still recovering. Flash and only flash for the next couple weeks...

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  3. Jeex. This comment thing is driving me nuts. Joe, I've tried to post on your blog a few times -- it's not you it's me. Thanks for saying congrats.

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  4. Milo, a novelette in a week, was it? That's quite something.

    Hey Cate, maybe one day they'll be an anthology call for a Gardener, or a Walker inspired collection. That would be cool. Although we'll probaly be dead, but still . . .

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  5. Congrats on the pro sale and meeting your W1S1 goals.

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  6. Congratulations on the sale! :)

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  7. Deb, if I had a nickle for every girl who said "it's not you it's me" to me...I'd have a buttload of nickles.

    Have you tried using Blogger on a different browser? There are some sites that don't work perfectly for me in Chrome, so I open up Firefox for them. I mean, I'm sure you've already exhausted every possibility, but you never know.

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  8. Trying to post again, this time with a whole new browser. Let's see how Chrome manages it.

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  9. ooh, so far so good. Thanks Joe.

    Hello Jeff and Golden, thanks for swinging by.

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  10. More great news, Deborah. You're an inspiration!

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  11. Whoop-whoop! congrats - this is great news!

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  12. Definitely keep at it. The only way is forward.

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