Only two more chapters!

I’m only two chapters away from finishing the first draft of Gunslinger to the Stars! This book was supposed to be finished a month ago, but life got busy and my chronic disorganization got in the way.

Of course, these last few chapters are taking WAY longer to write than I thought they would, just like all of my books. It’s like Zeno’s paradox for writers: no matter how close you are to finishing the damn thing, you’re still only halfway to the end.

The ending for this book is going to be awesome, though. Truly awesome. How do I know? Because I started this book with Chekhov’s armory, and the only gun that hasn’t been fired is called Charity. Why? Because Charity is the greatest of all, Charity never faileth (even when all things fail), and whosever shall be found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.

So yeah, I’m really excited for Gunslinger. It’s probably the funnest, most entertaining book I’ve written to date. I tell people it’s like Monster Hunter International meets Guardians of the Galaxy. I actually told Larry Correia that at LTUE back in February, and he got a kick out of it.

In other news, I’ve decided to publish a bunch of short stories in the next couple of months. These stories have been out on submission for a while, but it’s time to put them out there for you guys to read.

I’ve decided that any short story market that takes longer than 60 days to respond with a form rejection is not worth my time. If the magazines were the only way to get these stories out, then sure, I’d grin and bear it, but in an age of indie publishing it just doesn’t make sense. Why should I wait three, four, or five months for each market to make a decision? Multiply that by ten or fifteen markets, and my stories can be tied up for years. I don’t need that, and my readers don’t need that either.

Stand-alone short stories have always been hit or miss for me. A few, like Starchild and Worlds Without Number, sell at a small but consistent rate. Others, like Decision LZ1527, haven’t performed as consistently. I’m never quite sure whether to publish a short story as a stand-alone, so I’m going to just throw them all up there and see how well they perform after three or four months. Let the market decide.

As for the ones that don’t perform well, I’ll take down the stand-alones and republish them in bundles and short story collections instead. No sense keeping an individual title up if it isn’t selling. I’ve already taken down a couple of the old ones, which will definitely go up later in some of these bundles. Trouble is, I just haven’t had stories availabe to bundle them with.

So you can expect to see that in the next few months, as well as (hopefully) Gunslinger to the Stars. The first draft is pretty rough, but I don’t think the revision process is going to take that long. Mostly I just need to run it past my gun nut friends to make sure I got all the details right, and find an awesome artist to design the cover.

I’ll leave you with Shostakovich’s Second Waltz, because it’s a fantastic waltz that’s been stuck in my head for several days now. Enjoy!