Contemplating the Short Story

As of this morning, my sales total for January is 1026 copies.  It could go higher, given that Barnes and Noble seems to still be not quite caught up on their sales tracking stuff, but the important thing is that I hit that goal.  So thanks to all of you who helped get me there!

I’ve been chugging along with work on my anthology short story, which features my Fae assassin Ransom and the young Seer Isla (I say she’s young…she’s 25) who has been a prisoner for one of the bad guys for the last 20 years.  This pair will (I THINK) be the ones the first full length Mirus novel follows.  After that, Mick and Sophie, and after THAT… :speaks in little voice: maybe, kinda, possibly a slim possibility of coming back to Gage and Embry.  Not making any promises because I’ve already had 2 metaplots blow up and turn into something else, but that’s the direction my brain seems to possibly be heading in.  Which is not at all what I planned on.  But Devil’s Eye, and the world information that came from that story (which y’all didn’t necessarily see), changed everything.  I truly thought I was done with their story.  Now…not so sure.

As I’ve been working on this short story (which is actually going to BE a short story–HUZZAH!), I’ve been wishing that I was better at the short story thing.  Because what I REALLY want to do for readers–given that it takes me a long time to produce an actual book–is to give you snippets from my world.  Glimpses of other stuff going on in the form of short stories.  In my mind (keep in mind that this is still in pipe dream phase), they would follow the various secondary characters that y’all want to see more of but that I don’t plan to use as mains.  There would also be some stories from other characters in the Mirus world that were originally going to get a book and now aren’t because of that whole Metaplot Disaster thing.  The idea would be that access to these would be exclusive to newsletter subscribers.  I’d have a password protected page with downloads of all the available short stories, and when you signed up for the newsletter or when a new one came out, you’d get notified and given the password so that you then had access to whatever was available.  Then someday very long down the line, I would have enough to put together for some kind of compilation release to sell.

It’s one of those things that sounds GREAT on paper.  Whether I can pull it off is a whole other kettle of fish.  I’d like to try, I think.  There wouldn’t be any kind of schedule, and it would be wholly dependent on my whim of what little snip of a story came to my brain.

On a somewhat related note, the short story thing also has me going back to the chunks of books I wrote last year–like the original version of Revelation that followed Orrin (remember Mr. Sparky from FBS?) and his lady Dahlia.  They’re one of the couples getting abandoned with the metaplot shift, but I’ve got 22k of novel just kinda hanging out.  I’m going back to look at it with a discerning eye to see if I can take what’s there and turn it into a short story/novelette thing.  Things will need cutting and adapting some to fit with my current metaplot, but I’m okay with that.  At least it would be USED and not just hanging out on my hard drive.  That would be incredibly gratifying for me because it would mean that I DID actually produce something other than Devil’s Eye last year that was worth using somehow.