Crawling Into The Playground Of My Mind

Today's post will be one part update and one part exploration as it applies to my writing and the various projects I have on hand.

1} Update

I'm making steady, albeit very slow, progress in rewriting my crime novella/novel "It's Just Business". Free time, as always, is a precious commodity that I don't have great quantities of. So I plod along the best I can.

I've now reached the decision on what I want to do with my completed novellas "Shadow's Vengeance" and "Blackness In The White Sand" and where I want to go, and that is to go the self-publishing route. I want to do Smashwords for the e-book version and Createspace for the print version of my novellas.

The main reason as to why I decided to self-publish is that the novella, for what its worth, is unusually hard to land with a publisher (see the rejects I got for Shadow's Vengeance). Most publishers prefer the novel (i.e. 60K+) format as opposed to the novella format, and except for my commercial debut, most of my stories are in that particular format.

With that being said, I am having a devil of a time trying to find an acceptable cover for my novella Shadow's Vengeance. The problem that I'm finding is a bit of a sticky issue, in that my female MC's are black, and for the subject matter in question (Hell, demons and angels) all of the type of covers that I've found to fit, use white models as their anchor.

I really don't want to use landscapes and things like that for my novella, as having a person would make a better connection/tie-in for the novella. So, we shall keep looking and hopefully I'll find something before the end of the year.

2} The playground of my mind

I think I've mentioned previously that when I tap into my subconscious, the writing that springs forth has a tendency to be uber violent. This particular point was driven home earlier this year when I decided to put away a rather revolting (IMO) crime novella/novel. The content contained within that story runs directly counter to what I can tolerate in my reading, and as such, always gave me a severe case of the creeps whenever I decided to work on it. After I'd put it away, I swore I would never take a stroll down that particular pathway again.

Sad to say, I am travelling down that particular pathway again, as I'm now mining not only the dark recesses of my memory banks, but examining some of the ethical quandaries as well.

What I mean about ethical quandaries, which I'm sure we all have faced at one time or another in our lives, is that some of the content that I'm creating runs directly counter to how I actually stand to a given part of the content.

But, as some are want to say, sometimes the genre that you choose to write in will often dictate how the content should be created. In the crime genre, it is my belief (and I'm sure people will disagree with this belief) that you really have to lose whatever inhibitions you may have about a particular subject/concept in order to write a satisfying story.

This is something that I'm actively doing with this novella/novel.

The basic premise is that a drug dealer has pawned his wife off to one of his lower level seller/runner. The other basic plot is that the end of the novella/novel takes place at a funeral. So my main issue is to get from the start of plot A to the end of plot B by any means necessary. And because it's in the crime genre as well as the paranormal genre, it gives me carte blanche to get from A to B.

For the moment, I'm not really thrilled about some of the scenes I've written, but I keep reminding myself that in the crime genre, the end justifies the means.

Or does it?