I’ve taken a couple day off from work this week, and along with the holiday, I hope to have to the time to get some more writing done. I’ve already completed a scene that I needed to add in order for action later on in the book to work – 9 pages, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it entailed incorporating the research I had done into the story via action and dialog, which was fairly time consuming.

I’ve added that scene and made a few changes to what I already had to make it fit. Now to pick up where I left off originally and get my characters on the road!

I haven’t posted in a while due to the busy-ness of going on vacation (a caribbean cruise-Yay!) and the holidays (also Yay!), but now it’s time to get back to business!

I was working from home the other day and a co-worker sent me a text and I responded. For some bizarre reason auto-correct changed my “important” to “inn portability” – which doesn’t even make sense, by the way. I immediately sent another text correcting it to important. My co-worker responded with “What, no mobile hotels? I’m sorely disappointed.” That made me think, under what circumstance would a mobile hotel come into play? And, BAM! I had the idea for a new story – a series of short stories, I’m thinking.

The very next day I got my weekly email from Duotrope with new publishing opportunities. One of them was for an anthology of super-hero short stories. BAM, again!

I put the two together and came up with an awesome new series possibility that I am very excited about. Now I have to get a move on and finish my current project!

I was advised that I should change my blog to WordPress – that it was a better site and would do more for me. And that may be so, but there is so much detail involved in getting it all set up that I feel a bit overwhelmed. Of course, I’m not really a Tech Person – once I understand something I do okay, but it’s getting to that point that’s making me a little crazy.

Read an interesting article by Steven James as guest blogger on Brian Kerns Editor blog for Writer’s Digest: “6 Secrets of Writing a Novel Without an Outline.” I found it fascinating and vindicating as that is how I also write. I even commented on the blog (something I never do!)

If you, too, write without an outline, you will also find it interesting. You can read it here:

6 Secrets of Writing a Novel Without an Outline
http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/6-secrets-of-writing-a-novel-without-an-outline?et_mid=641764&rid=239631409

It’s amazing. You think that if you’re not actually “writing” you’re not “working.” But that is not the case at all. There is posting on your blog and/or Facebook page. Then there’s editing. And that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been working on a story to submit to a contest and of course I put it off until the last moment – today is the 13th and the cut off is the 15th.

I was all set to submit when I read the max word count – 4000, and my story is 4637! So I’ve been “editing” or cutting things out, in other words. Getting rid of unnecessary adverbs (I never even realized I had so many!) and passive voice passages – was counting is 2 words versus counted – 1 word. Now for one last read through to make sure I didn’t aggressively cut out something necessary and I will be hitting that old Submit button.

As you can see, the pen name that I have attached to this blog, my Facebook page and Twitter account is Syl E. Knight – which is the name I want to use to publish my fantasy, sci fi and horror stories. But what about my non-genre literary work or my YA stories? I don’t know that I want to publish those stories/books under the same pen name. (This, of course, assumes I do eventually get published.) I know many authors do use different names for different genres, or at least they used to do so.

In the old days of publishing, the author could choose a name, publish under that name and the agent, publicist or publisher would handle getting his/her name out there. But publishing today seems to be a different world. Authors appear to be responsible for getting name recognition via Twitter, Google+, Facebook, blogs, web pages, and whatever other methods there are that I haven’t thought of.

So do other authors have separate Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for each pen name? That seems like it would be a lot of work maintaining that many accounts and that much information.

So I am unsure whether I should just tie the one set of web presence things (Twitter, blog, Facebook) to all of the names or set them up individually for each name or just say, the heck with it and just publish under one name.

I must admit that, being basically lazy, I am leaning towards the last choice.