Adventures in Writing! The New Fall Schedule

Right, we’re going to call this week, excepting the end of “Interviewing Leather,” a vacation week. Which makes a little sense. I’ve done a lot of writing since June, and between that and the start of school, it’s probably at least a little lucky my brain hasn’t exploded from the heat.

Next week, we’ll launch back into things. Call it the new fall season, hot off the heels of a successful midseason replacement. However, I’m going to tweak things a little bit here and there, and this post will tell you exactly how I’m doing that.

First off, you’ll notice that posts now have tags underneath them (though I haven’t finished going through the archives and tagging things. I guess that’s what I’m doing for the rest of the week). At Wednesday’s suggestion, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.3, and I’m reorganizing the way I’m doing things. See, the category system is good for general things, but when you drill down to actual titles and storylines, you end up with way too many categories.

So, here’s how it’s going to go. I’ll continue to categorize things by general category. I’ll also tag them, and be pretty liberal with the tags. For serials and continuing stories, one of the tags will always be the title of the story — you can click on the tag and get links to all chapters of a given story.

As an example? I give you the Interviewing Leather page, automatically arranged by the eudaemons of network management and database schemae: http://banter-latte.annotations.com/tag/interviewing-leather/. It does about ten posts a page, so make use of the “previous entries” link at the bottom of the page to get the whole story.

At the same time, I’m going to be liberal about tagging — part of the point of the tags is the ability to make bizarre connections, and unlike Categories they’re very freeform. So you’ll see some tags like “coffee” show up, where I’d never do a category like that. Mostly I’ll try to have fun with it.

Secondly, we have our new Schedule of posts!

Why a new schedule? Because I was getting close to a brain hemorrhage before. The idea was I would do three major posts a week, before. Then, when I wasn’t looking, Leather and Chapman exploded.

So, here’s the schedule as it now stands:

Mondays will continue to be Myth days, and will return next week. As one of the two most popular things on here, it’s not about to go away. Besides, I like writing it.

Wednesdays are now going to be Justice Wing days. Yeah, the limited series did well so now we’re picking up a commitment. I have a master plan for it that I’d like to flesh out. There’s a number of longer stories I want to do, and some shorter ones, and “this” and “that.” My current plan is to take some of the longer stories I have planned in the pipeline — like The Death of Paragon and Crossing the Rubicon — and break them up into shorter “chapters” which themselves will then be broken up into weekly chunks about the size of the individual Leather posts. So, we might do a six part chapter of The Death of Paragon, then do a 1-3 part short story, then do a five part chapter of Crossing the Rubicon, then… well, you get the point. It’s an experiment. And by the end of it, I should have several books’ worth of stories actually more or less done.

As a side note, there are about three different plans being pursued right now for a dead trees version of “Interviewing Leather,” involving some nice value-adds. One of which actually involves an interested small press publishing company. Which blows my mind when you figure part one started with me saying “I have no idea where I could publish this.”

Fridays are now the Storytelling day. These are going to be short stories and multi-part serials in a variety of genres and fictional universes. For example, Homecoming will finish up on Fridays to begin with (under the Mythic Heroes tag, naturally). While there will be some superheroing, this is mostly going to be where science fiction, fantasy, horror, contemporary fiction, magic realism, surrealism — you know, stuff goes.

Weekends are going to be the new home for Protected Novel Chapters. It’s like a bonus premium you get in your cereal box. I can’t swear there will be a chapter every week — it’s actually significantly harder to write a chapter of Theftworld than it is to write a chapter of “Interviewing Leather” — but the whole point of this exercise was to get me to write a novel chapter a week, and I’m going to at least try to accomplish that.

There will also be the monthly Myth Calls on the first weekend of each month. Just because I enjoy those and people seem to like them.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are getting way scaled back. The idea originally was that these were random and optional, and we’re going back to that. No more continuing stories on those days, for example. If I decide to post more bits and pieces of my writing past, this is where it will go. Ditto poetry or vignettes that come to me. I may give Mason Kramer’s Kayble form a try one of these Tuesdays or Thursday, for example.

And there may be essays about writing, or about the backstory and/or structure of my other stories. Discussions of the myths or the like. Annotations and notes. Some of those — like this post — will be crossposted to Websnark because that’s the Nonfiction hangout. Though I’m not entirely sure anyone over there would be that interested in this stuff. Who can tell? Not me, that’s for sure.

Finally, I’m beginning to ponder merchandising. Beyond the potential Dead Tree Leather, mind. I’ve never been overly enamored of the Cafepress tee shirts but some of their other stuff is cool. Their coffee mugs are primo, for example. (I’ve had some of them for years, now.) If you have any thoughts on what you might want to see on a tchotchke, chime in in the comments if you will.

And finally, thank you for reading. Seriously. It makes all the difference in the world to have someone on the other side of these things.

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