My older brother came running out of the basement yesterday to tell me his most recent genius marketing plan: writing a prequel to Only Human I can put up for free. Needless to say, in the middle of planning and attempting to write my sequel and doing my best to avoid working on three other books I want to work on, it wasn't really what I wanted to hear.
Truth is, he's probably right.
Free generates downloads and downloads generate money for the rest of the series if you can spark someones interest. While I don't want to put the three years of work that is Only Human up for free, putting a little prequel to hopefully spark some interest in it is somewhat easier.
My writing has changed a bit since I was sixteen and started Only Human. While I gave it some definite changes, the writing is definitely my younger self and not the person now writing the sequel. As I sat staring at the blank page in a Microsoft Word document labeled 'Prequel', I pondered what would happen if people liked it, paid for Only Human, and felt gypped because I wrote it at a younger age. Whatever, I can only second guess myself so much.
I wrote it in under an hour though my brother seems to have had more than three pages envisioned. Oh well, after he reads it I'll see what he says. It wasn't too bad to write except that I didn't want to spoil to much about OH in the process. I managed to tie in a character that doesn't come until the second book with the prequel which I was proud of and will hopefully keep even through whatever overhaul it will probably get.
I've started two other stories in the last few months, one that'll probably be a novella and one that's a stand alone novel. The stand alone novel is about the daughter of a man who runs a sort of mafia, making his two biological sons and one adopted son fight for who will control it. She is in the middle of it, not wanting any of her brothers to fight each other and trying to ward off the hostility her two older brothers have toward their younger adopted brother who's grown up on the street. It was inspired by a few different things, mostly the fact that I wanted to write about a girl in a dangerous, powerful family. We'll see how it goes, it might just be too cheesy to finish like a lot of my stories. I've gotten a lot better at fixing ideas recently instead of just scrapping them though.
My other book is one I don't want to say too much about since I think I might really like it or think it's too embarrassing to show anyone. I wanted to put my Korean knowledge to use and found a way I think it might work, mainly making fun of a lot of the dramas and cliches of Korean dramas that I watch. It's not set in Korea or really about Koreans but about a girl who loses a bet to a rival and has to write a book that's like a k-drama, much to her chagrin. She's an upcoming writer and is afraid of pleasing her most difficult critic - a reviewer on a website she frequents. It's quite fun to write since her character is a lot like mine and her sarcasm can be quite funny at times, even to me. I suspect she's going to lost a fair amount in edits since I don't want her - or me - to look like total cynics :)
I don't know if I mentioned before but one of my goals in my writing career (if I ever have one) is to write books in a whole bunch of different genres. I'm used to the authors I like in contemporary, the authors I like in sci fi, and the authors I like in whatever else I'm reading but I think it would be fun to have my name in a whole bunch of different categories. I already have science fiction (thank you Only Human) but I'd like to do a proper, nerdy science fiction one too like aliens, spaceships, the whole thing. Not that it's really up my alley but I might as well try. I guess I'd have to go for a dystopian one at some point too though I really don't care for those.
After finishing yesterday's post I remembered another guy whose character I liked in the book. Dan Wells Partials series is a really good series, one I just finished reading this month and Samm is a great main. I suspect I like him because he was actually written by a man so he doesn't feel like the cheesy contrived hunk that most heroes usually feel. I also liked Ginny Aiken's Shop-Til-U-Drop series and her hero. He starts out seeming like a stupid character, a 'lunkhead' as the heroine describes him at one point but I liked him a lot.
Write again at the beginning of the week,
Anna Leigh
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