It's Just Business

I thought I would lighten the mood a little bit by writing about my latest writing project, because frankly, I'm finding myself getting wound tighter than the NAACP over a Texas Rodeo Clown.

This particular novella , which I've mentioned numerous times in the past either in passing or as a full blown post almost from day one of this blog, is what I considered to be the platform that I've launched numerous writing endeavors: five blogs, two short stories, one novel, one chapbook and one short story trilogy.

I'm not entirely sure where I came up with the basic premise of this novella (yes, really). All I remember about this novella are the following items:

1} Crime genre. The plot, as I've been able to deduce, is about a low level drug dealer who gets stuck with his boss's skanky girlfriend. One subplot features her getting him into a lot of trouble. Another has a rival drug dealer wanting to use the both of them as bait for a hostile takeover.

2} I wrote myself into a serious corner back in 2007 and it took me several month to get out of it, which means I went nuclear on it, aka, purging a huge chunk of text to get myself back to where I started getting lost.

3} I had the final scene of the book play out to the end at the end of each chapter. In other words, while you were reading each chapter, you were also reading a huge part of the final chapter at the same time.

4} It was my first interracial story (you can thank my small circle of female friends for that inspiration).

5} It wasn't a paranormal fantasy (didn't really get into that until a few years later).

6} It underwent at least four name changes. Early on I called it "Cedar Mountain Ecstasy", then "Ecstasy", then "E", then "It's Just Business". The main reason for the title changes is that I grew disenchanted with each title, until I came up with one that I semi-like.

So basically, even though I'm not doing a total rewrite from scratch, I'm still tweaking the hell out of it.

In addition to the painfully obvious sentence/paragraph/grammar repair that needs to be done, I plan on performing the following modifications as well.

1} Turning the female MC into a hybrid human. However, I do need to come up with a different feline to use. I've already used a lynx and a jaguar in my stories for hybrids and a cougar is out of the question (obviously), so I'm thinking of using a cheetah as a hybrid.

2} I still want to keep it as a crime novella, although in this one its bad guy versus bad guy versus semi-bad guy, so that means I may have to tweak the violence a little. Plus a add new kind of drug since crystal meth/crack/ecstasy is so 90's. Maybe K2, which is becoming popular amongst the younger generation.

3} Sex. Would you believe that I have exactly one implied and one semi-explicit scene of sex? I know, it's hard to believe, but I think I need to tweak those, plus a few others as well. I must be slipping in my old age.

4} Interracial. Interracial couples are still my relationship of writing choice, so it behooves me to keep it like that.

5} Locale. I simply love using Connecticut as my locale of choice, since it's the one that I'm most comfortable with. If you can use local as a basis for all things connected to your story, then half the battle is already one.

I think this basically sums up what I want to do with this novella/novel, which is to bring it more in line with what I already got sitting on the sidelines: paranormal/fantasy.
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Since I originally wrote this post about a month ago (yeah, I'm just that lazy), some things went bump in the night. Specifically, I started re-writing the novella and so far, I managed to reduce the page count by two. I've tidied up the grammar and started filling in the logic holes that I enthusiastically wrote in the first time around. I've tweaked the female MC and turned her into a hybrid but so far have resisted making her uber violent and uber assertive like I've done in my other completed novellas. Finally, I started working on the sex thing, but so far, haven't needed to make it that totally graphic. Yet.

In other news, if you haven't had the chance to check out this:

You should give it a chance this coming weekend, as on August 24th and 25th, I'll be giving it away for free on Amazon. That's right, absolutely free. So check it out, and while you're at it, you can wander over to Smashwords and check out my short story trilogy, which is partially free as well.