Snowflakes & Psuedonyms

Today I spent time putting The Dead Pens into what is called The Snowflake Method.  It's a multipart process where the writer builds the story piece by piece, working it from a simple statement to a complete outline.  It's helped me flesh out the story in ways I did not expect.  I've been able to work past the sticking points and I expect to be writing the story itself soon.

Again, this will be more like The Stocking Dead than anything else.

And longer.

While I have been working on The Dead Pens, I put together another short in another genre under a pseudonym.  It's not my usual writing, so I won't be publicizing it as I would the others.  I picked up a four-star review, but the sales, even the free promo sales, haven't been near as good as with my horror stories, so I'll probably consider this more an experiment than an avenue worth pursuing.

The Process

So, I'm working on the story, a story that I'm tentatively calling The Dead Pens. I have an outline done, but I can't help feeling that the real story is the second half of the outline, not the outline as a whole. That's frustrating for me because I should be further than 1500 words into it at the moment. But something is not clicking. For one thing it's an origins story and it feels too linear.

One of the things I felt I did well in The Stocking Dead was pop back and forth along the timeline. The narrative always moved forward, even if time didn't.

Looking at the outline for The Dead Pens as it is now the actual plot seems too far away from the beginning. It's like I have all this explaining to do before things actually begin to happen. That seems like a death knell as far as readership goes.

I hate to think I need to rework the outline, but it's better to rework the outline than it is to rework the draft.

Infographic: I want to make a horror movie.

During my weekly Stumble, I found this neat infographic about making horror movies.

I want to make a horror movie.