In case you hadn't noticed, I'm back from my trip and posting stuff again. :)

Sadly I'm running low on things to post. I have a little more of For Love of Perfection, and I hope to finish it soon and post the whole thing. I have one more Dragon, Maiden, Knight story ready. I've got a handful of poems, I'll probably post those too.

I have quite a few chapters of Blood and Darkness, but I notice that it's not proving as popular as my other stories. I suspect because it's too bloody/dark for most of my readers, but it's got too much plot and character development to really draw people who enjoy bloody/dark stuff as a fetish. I'm sure there's a nice little niche audience out there that will appreciate it, but they're obviously not finding me. I really am bad at publicity and promoting my stuff. Ah well. I still write mostly for an audience of one, that being me. :) Posting here is just incidental, and because I do like it when other people enjoy my work.

I'll be leaving tomorrow at a ridiculous hour of the morning, and won't be back for nearly a week, so there won't be any new updates for a while. I will be checking e-mail, but may or may not be checking FA. E-mail is always the best way to reach me anyhow, it's spark.costumes[at]gmail.com

Kind of just because I can. :) I don't feel like my poetry is nearly as strong as my prose, but what the hey. I post horrible sketches over on the art account, I can post poems here.

More prose stories coming tomorrow, probably. I may post the last of the finished Rhiannon Family stories, since I know Ariana, at least, wants to read it. :)

Ah heck. Might as well. I'll write a drabble of your choice for whoever catches a screenshot of 1k pageviews. :)

Any subject matter. Length will be at least one full page, probably more like two or three. Time taken to write... that's up in the air, really. I don't quite write on demand the way I can draw on demand, but I'll try not to take too long.

I'm watching my page views slowly creep up, and it would be kind of nice to do something for the 1k milestone. On my other accounts I've offered a kiriban, but I really don't know what I'd use as a prize here... I don't have the time to offer sewing, I don't really have the inclination to offer art, but I'm not sure if anybody would regard writing as a prize worth bothering with.

Dunno, if I agreed to write a drabble for whoever caught the 1,000 page views screenshot, would anybody be interested?

Stuff ready to post:

The Redemption of Count Dracula
Father and Son
Phoenix Destiny
For Love of Perfection part 2
The Feathered Serpent
Blood and Darkness, parts lots more.
Poetry?

Because I can't re-order my gallery to put all the related stuff together, I've put appropriate links in the descriptions, and updated my profile with a reading guide, which likes to the first chapter/part of all my stories. :) Hopefully people will find it helpful.

Sometimes I swear I am the only person on this site who knows how to format .txt files so they're actually readable. Eeesh. :P Was trying to find a few new authors to read, but everybody either uses a file format that won't display (and I hate having to download something, I just want to read it here!) or else has no line breaks, unknown characters, and a generally messy jumble of unreadable crap. *grumble mutter mutter* Oh well.

All uploaded, woot.

Over the next week or two I'll be posting the Rhiannon children stories. I've got one for each of the five, except that Damien got two, and Arthur's isn't finished yet, so I can't post it until it is. (I'm having a rough time with that one. I know how it starts, but I have no idea how it ends. Usually it's the middle that gives me fits, but this time I'm trying to come up with a conclusion.) Anyhow. Serapha also has two, but one of them is going to be part of the upcoming Blood and Magic novel, so I don't know if I'll post is separately or not.

In any case, look forward to five (or six) more Rhiannon family stories soon. :)

Then after that... well, I might have some more of the teaser shorts finished up, (or at least some more pieces of them) and I should have another Dragon, Maiden, Knight ready soon.

I'm also *thinking* of posting Blood and Darkness, which is the full story of "evil Aidan" from chapter 8 of Blood and Fire. The problem there is that it is mature rated all the way through, so I'm not sure if I want to or not. (You can't really tell the story of somebody's fall into depravity without describing some depravity.) Opinions on that are welcome. It's not a finished story yet, but there is about 90 pages worth of it written, so it's quite a respectable saga at this point.

So lots more writing to come!

My muse is back, but my muse apparently doesn't want to work on any of my publishable writing, no, the muse is insisting on working on all the really demented "the world will never see this" stuff. :P My library of stories that will never get posted here is growing fast.

Happily I have also worked on a couple of things I can share, including some more of City of Sunlight which I'll be posting soon, and quite a lot more of the Blood and Fire universe, which I still have tons of stuff to post from.

Thinking of uploading some poems. I VERY seldom write poetry. Probably all my poetry together doesn't have as many words as just one of my short stories. :) But I do have a few poems. Any interest in reading 'em?

Yeah, I figured I might as well finish uploading Blood and Fire. Most of you have read it all already anyhow.

Also, there may actually be new material soon. But as I start more things than I finish, it'll probably be another beginning, rather than an ending. I *do* intend to finish The Garden Maze, I know how it ends, I just have to write my way from where I am to where that happens first. :P

Meanwhile look forward to some more Blood and Fire, and probably some "teaser" first pages from several stories. Comment on the ones you like, so I'll know which ones I should be trying to finish first. :)

Drowning in non-writing work, and lacking any real desire to write right now. When I do get back to writing I'm going to try finishing The Garden Maze, as I know several people are eager to see it done. But I write for fun, not for profit (ha!) nor for attention (ha, ha!) and right now writing would not be much fun, so don't expect any updates any time soon.

I'm working on a collaborative world project. Slightly surrealist fantasy setting, so those who are liking the Labyrinth/Garden Maze might enjoy it.

I'm thinking of opening it up to folks from FA.

Any interest? Basically the idea is everybody helps throw ideas and concepts into the pot, we discuss which ones work and which don't, and when we have a more or less finished world everybody writes some sort of story set in said world.

Pretty much just what the title says. I'm not happy with the title "Labyrinth of Shadows." It's too... well, it's too much what thick-skulled adventurers who go there would call the maze, and not enough what the maze and the story actually are. So while the labyrinth in the story is still named the Labyrinth of Shadows, as it was named by those thick-skulled adventurers, the story itself is now named The Garden Maze.

Hopefully I don't confuse anybody too much.

Also a new, if sadly short, update is coming very shortly.

:P All I've got finished to post is more Blood and Fire, which hasn't really gotten any reaction, nevermind that it's my favorite. Everybody else loves the dragons more.

Anyhow... I'm not really back, though I may post every once in a blue moon when I write something new.

There's a new furry writing forum around. They don't seem to be doing much to advertise it, but on the off chance you folks hear about it, I thought I'd let you know...

That you can get banned, without any warning, without having broken the rules, for making a joke that the moderator doesn't like.

http://forum.roguerodent.com is the place.

The joke was "It's dead Jim" in a thread about how to get new members, because a new one hadn't joined in some time, and there had been no new posts for four or five days. I was trying to be amusing and start up the discussion on how to get new people again.

Instead, I got banned. And sent a very ranty note, I might add, about how I was defying the moderators (not sure what I did that falls under that category, since, you know, they don't give warnings, just bans.) And that I was harming the forum. (Funny, that, I was THE single most active poster there...) And I think I was insulted, the mod called me a "weed." Which is new to me, but probably not intended to be polite. :P

So I suggest that unless you're happy with getting banned for anything and everything that annoys a mod, with no warning and no chance to explain yourself, that you stay far away from the place. It's probably going to die soon anyhow, since they seem pretty lousy at getting new members, and pretty good at driving active members away.

I'm not going to delete what I've put up, but I'm taking a break from posting, and I might just leave FA entirely, as far as writing goes. For the amount of effort I've poured into this place, I haven't gotten much return.

It's an interesting thing I've noticed. A lot of people talk about my work in terms of "when" I'll be sending it in to publishers. And I recently got somebody reviewing it who rated everything in terms of how publishable it was.

Everyone really seems to assume that publication is automatically the goal of any reasonably skilled author. I sometimes wonder if these people know anything about the publishing industry. :)

Did you know that roughly one out of every thousand manuscripts submitted to a conventional publisher actually makes it into print form? Did you know that out of those publishers accepting manuscripts in the fantasy genre only one accepts any form of digital submission? Not only do the vast majority of publishers not accept submission over the internet, they won't even accept submission by CD. It's printed manuscript, in their specific format (which is slightly different for each and every one of them) or nothing. And they don't return your manuscript when they're done with it, they throw it away. Although some will send it back if you send it with a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

So. I have three novels. I could try to get them published. I suppose my odds are slightly better than one in a thousand because a certain number of those people are delusional idiots who can't actually write. But the cold truth is that most of them are perfectly good writers. But so few books get published that a publisher has to be picky, and in this day and age they're pretty conservative. They'd rather publish a book from a known author than an unknown, so the vast majority of their printing capacity is dedicated to authors that are already published. So this inevitably stacks the odds against somebody new, no matter how good they are. I could be the next J.K. Rowling and still I might get rejected by everybody and never published at all.

And to grasp that slim chance I need to go to a massive effort. I need to find publishers accepting submissions, find their requirements, completely re-do the formatting of my work, get it printed out, and mail it in, and do this not once, but time after time after time after time, while rejections arrive to depress and discourage me. And the end result? If I'm very, very, very, lucky I get to have somebody tell me to change things I love about my stories (because real editors do that!) and I get to go to more work and effort to correct and re-write portions of my stuff, and when that's all done... I get a tiny trickle of profit. Most new books aren't best sellers. Most new books sell in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands, and an author makes only pennies per book. So all that for the pleasure of seeing my name on a cover and the reward of a few hundred bucks.

I might as well go with self-printing if I just want to hold a copy in my hands, but that's even worse. The threshold is lower, I'm guaranteed to get published, but I'm also guaranteed to never make a profit. Not with my books, not with my ability to sell myself. Because Lulu and similar print on demand places will not get my books in bookstores, I have to do that. I have to sell copies myself, and frankly, I can't get readers when the book is free. I'm not equipped to get people to pay for these!

But you know, I'm okay with this.

That's the funny thing. Everybody thinks that I should be putting myself through the misery, jumping through the hoops, dealing with the rejection and the stress, and I think "why?" Why should I? I didn't sit down and write my first childhood story (it was about Care Bears and balloons) because I wanted money and fame, I wrote it because writing in and of itself gives me pleasure. It is an escape, a joy, and honestly a thing which I couldn't stop doing if I wanted to.

So I'll continue to do what I'm doing now, writing stories and sharing them here and elsewhere on the internet, and I'm perfectly content to leave it at that. The frustrations of trying to get readers here are nothing compared to the frustrations of trying to get published!

1. When did you start writing?

I was in kindergarten. So... five? I wrote and illustrated a story about balloons, and I bound it into a little book and everything.

2. First drafts: Handwritten, typed, or some combination?

Typed, always typed. I occasionally take physical notes in a little notebook, especially if I'm traveling, but even notes mostly get typed.

3. Do you keep any kind of notebook or writer's journal, and if so, what kinds of things go into it?

Nothing so organized. I usually have a notebook for jotting to-do lists and such at any given time, and I'll occasionally put some plot ideas or story notes down in one, but more often I jot things down on the computer in notepad.

4. Do you set any quotas for your work (number of words per day, number of hours per day, etc.)? Why or why not?

Ha! No. I write primarily for fun, and what fun is that?


5. Are you most comfortable writing short stories, novels, or something else?

Long stories, novellas, and novels. I don't do much under 20k words these days.

6. What's your favorite kind of story to write?

Fantasy. Stories where the characters learn and grow. Things OTHER than "teenage orphan saves the world as prophesied." Those are okay but I like writing about adults, and about stuff other than saving the world.

7. Talk about a story of yours that was easy to write and one that was difficult to write, and why.

Blood Choice was the easiest thing I ever did. It felt like it was writing itself. I mean, I had to do a lot of grunt work over the prose, but all the plot things and scenes that normally give me fits to hammer out just happened, I hardly had to think about it. The hardest right now is Blood and Magic. *sigh* I know it will be a better story told as a mystery, without ever seeing the bad guy's point of view, but it's really hard to show what he does and why with that limitation. It's not something I've ever done before, but I really want to make it work, so I keep hammering away at it.

8. Which of your characters is closest to your sense of self? In other words, who do you most identify with in your own work to date?

Ha ha haha! OMG. Who don't I identify with? My characters are all Mary Sues, or my personalities, or people I've been in dreams. Seriously. All my main characters are me in some way.


9. What work are you most proud of right now?

Blood Choice. But nobody reads it. ;.;

10. What do you feel your strengths and weaknesses are as a writer?

Sound grammar is a strength. Horrible skills at writing action scenes is a weakness. :P

11. Name a few writers who have influenced you or your work in some way.

I really can't pin my writing style on any one or two authors. I hit the rate of one book a day when I was 12, and by the time I was 20 I was reading three books a day. It's dropped off in recent years because I have a life other than books now, but thousands and thousands of books have poured through my brain, I can't really say that any one of them stuck more than any other, honestly. Not that I'm consciously aware of, anyhow.

12. Talk about something you've written that you later found embarrassing for some reason.

I have no shame! If I did I wouldn't have posted ten+ year old stuff in my gallery.

13. Talk about the earliest stories you remember writing. What were they about?

Well, as I said, my first story was about balloons. And about Care Bears, but they were just there because they were easy to draw, the point of the story was sharing balloons with other children. I used to write a lot of sort of primitive fantasy epics about unicorns. (And by primitive I mean the storytelling skill level, not the setting they were in.) And tons of stuff about dragons. Dragons, dragons, dragons. Right now I mostly write vampires.

14. If you knew you would be successful, what would you most like to write?

What I'm writing now? I don't write things because I think they'll succeed, I write them because I want to write them. Any sort of success, however you measure it, is just a bonus.

15. What inspires you?

Everything. Dreams. Relationships I've had. Things I want to do. Scenes I see. The desert I grew up in. The forest and valley I live in now. Things I read. Things I draw. Things I see drawn.


16. How many projects do you tend to work on at once?

I have twelve things under way right now. That's pretty typical. And not counting things I've more or less abandoned but might maybe someday come back to.

17. Who reads your work before it's released to the public? Do you have beta readers, a critique group, etc.?

Heh. No. I don't like showing my freshly finished stuff to anybody, most things go through a lengthy personal editing cycle before I'll let anyone else lay eyes on them, and at that point I post them here to FA. The Sanguine Canvas is a big exception to that. Each section does get some editing before I post it, but much less than my other stories have gotten.


18. When you're not writing, what do you do for fun?

Draw. Hike. Make art from old My Little Pony toys. Garden. Go to wine tastings. Mess around on the internet. That last one should probably have gone first.


19. Advice to other writers?

The more you read the easier you'll find writing with correct grammar to be. It's a pain in the butt to try and learn it from textbooks, learn it by reading people who write it well. Then write whatever you like, and enjoy it, and don't take it too seriously, that's a good way to drive yourself nuts.

Oh, and if you FARKING ASK FOR CRITIQUE AND SOMEBODY GIVES YOU SOME, DON'T RESPOND BY ARGUING WITH IT!!!!! I really hate this. It's extremely rude. I've taken the time to read your work, and to write up a lengthy analysis, because you asked, when normally I wouldn't have read it at all, and then you turn around and tell me that I'm all wrong, and you did it right, and you don't need to change anything. Well if it's so perfect, why did you ask for critique then? Is it because you were secretly hoping that I'd say "It's so perfect I can't find anything wrong with it?" Well, buddy, people criticize farking Harry Potter. There's something wrong with ANY story. If you don't actually want critique, DON'T ASK FOR IT. If you get a crit you don't agree with, just thank the person for their time and ignore the advice, but for HEAVEN'S sake don't argue with them! They're doing you a favor! Suck it up and thank them!

*ahem* Pet peeve there. Of course if you didn't ask and some twit just volunteers a rude opinion, tell 'em off, but if you asked, well... you asked!

20. What are you currently working on?

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many things. Focusing on getting The Sanguine Canvas finished though, since I've started posting it and I sort of should.

21. Share the first three sentences of a work in progress.

Aidan “Darkangel” Rhiannon soared over a shifting landscape. Literally shifting, for with every minute that passed the ground beneath him changed, pastures suddenly replaced with houses, houses with forests, forests with desert. He was flying between worlds, using a skill he had learned from Alan the world-walker, his daughter's half brother and his good friend.

From "A Single Sunrise" a little thing I'm writing for Ariana. :)

If you can't see part six of The Sanguine Canvas, you'll need to change your settings. I marked it mature because it has some adult stuff in it, though it's not what I'd call pornography.

Just letting people know.

Hi! Here I am, having uploaded one story of many, many, many more to come. Not sure how often I'll upload, I don't think I'll keep a daily schedule, I'm already doing that here: http://bladespark.topcities.com/story if you want a daily fix, but those are pretty short. I'll probably do something like a longer piece every week here on FA.

Anyhow! Anybody know why my apostrophes are a horror of wtf on this thing? They look fine when I look at this in notepad, but viewing it here it's obvious that something is horribly wrong with them. How do I fix?