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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.

6 replies on “So many books, not enough time to write them”

Some cool ideas I’m sure.

Being SF writers does that mean it is harder to sell a fantasy type novel or are the genres so interlinked (always together in book stores) that it wouldn’t present a barrier?

I know the publisher ultimately has the like the premise but wondered if writers get pigeon holed especially when they are relatively “new”

I think writers do get pigeonholed. At least at first. I think it’s easier to have to have a track record (in general, there are always exceptions) in one genre before you branch out.

I think the market plays a part, too. Space opera is doing well at present, so I think that given a choice, our agent will choose these books in preference to something else for the moment.

Hi Karen, I’ve just read Stars Uncharted, and loved it to bits. Wonderful characters and a great story. Now I’m heading for the Linesman series – keen to read more of your work.

So many authors feel pigeon-holed, hope you guys don’t feel that way, if nothing else, another pen name for a different genre. Many authors I read have done that. Rachel Bach/Rachel Aaron, Jayne Anne Krentz/Jayne Castle, Lillith St Crow/Lili St Crow/Anna Beguine etc. Thought you might get a kick out of this as it relates to genre crossing readers: long time romance writer Jenny Cruise’s blog has a weekly feature where her readers offer up what books they are reading – Linesman has made an appearance there in the past, but Stars Uncharted was mentioned by several this week. http://arghink.com/2018/11/this-is-a-good-book-thursday-november-15-2018/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ArghInk+%28Argh+Ink%29 So obviously you have fans that cross genres!!

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