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Writing process

So many books, not enough time to write them

This morning Sherylyn and I had a working breakfast.  We do this roughly once every two months.  We go down to a local café, where the seats are comfortable, and we can linger over coffee.  Sometimes we talk about the current story we are writing, sometimes we talk about future writing.

Today, we talked about future stories we want to write.

It turns out that we have seventeen story ideas in train.

That’s right.  Seventeen.

Some of the stories are written to first draft or beyond.  None of them finished, mind, but some close enough to consider one-more-draft-and-then-ready-to-send-to-our-agent finished.  Others are little more than ideas that we want to work on.

So why aren’t we finishing the nearly-completed ones and sending them to our agent?  Two things.  Time and genre.

First, we need time to do that last draft before we send to our agent.  We both work full time, we’ve a book we must deliver. We have no time to complete other stories.

Second, not all of these are science fiction. 

Some of them are out-and-out fantasy. We even have one rural fantasy, set in the hot, dry landscape of Australia’s Mallee region.

Some of them are mashups—science and fantasy.  (Some readers might say that’s little different to what we have now.)

There are several portal world stories—where the portal is a teleport to another world in our universe, rather than a portal to an alternate reality. 

Plus lots of other fun ideas.

We don’t know if any of these stories are saleable.  What we do know is that the ones that we have already written/part written were fun to write.

That’s important, because above all, you should enjoy what you write.