Slideshow

Troy Kirby

Monday, May 2, 2011

Writing a finish line

I crossed a finish line this morning at 6:47 a.m. Pacific Time. No, it had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden's firefight with the CIA or special forces. It was the follow-up to Crunk, which should be announced in the next few months after I have some friends read it, some other people edit the book. Nothing gets past GO with me until it is ready. Why? Because readership is important. Not just the amount of books you sell, but the quality of those works.

I have a lot of ebooks that I could issue out today. About forty-five short stories. A bunch of other ebooks that could be pumped out. But the problem is, if the value isn't there, it makes demand go down. Part of that economics class in college that I actually remember. In order to continue providing the best material possible, I let it sit for a while, then go back, edit it a little more, add something here, take something away there. Otherwise, it's just not ready.

This follow-up to Crunk is a novel that I really like. It has a lot of action involved, but also a lot of deep characters and meaning. At least, at this stage of the game, I hope it does. It depends on what my friends think about it. Thus far, I haven't missed the mark. That either means I'm on a winning streak or about to have my luck run out. Either way, it will be fun to have it out the door.

That being said, something interesting is happening with my free penny dreadfuls on wattpad.

All of my short stories are less than a week old. Each one of them has at least 20 reads.

But the story which is superseding that expectation is What Remains of the World. It has about 100 reads thus far. That to me is great. I am thinking that if I get up to 10,000 reads with it, I will decide to expand the story to a 10,000 short story or 20,000 novella to expand the world I've created. That dystrophia thing has spoken loud and clear to me. And for some reason, people are liking that read too.

We have a lot of opportunities to do things in this world. Some people I truly believe don't see the opportunities. Instead they see faults, issues which make it hard to build something. I don't want to look at the amount of dollars I sell in a single week, month or year as indicative or whether I should write. Either I want to write, or I don't. That simple.

The thing about the book Crunk is, that after this follow-up, I have room for one more. Then I am done with that set of issues, unless something hits me as a good follow-up. I have one book which has been written that is sitting in a closet. I lost the first 64 pages a long time ago (which is fine, because parts of the book don't work), but I am starting to get revved up to re-write it and self-publish it.

By the way, The Harvest is doing well. This is not surprising. But the kindle orders for The Repo Blues are. When I wrote it, the story sat for a long time. It was original part of the follow-up book to Crunk. Now, it stands on its own as a good piece of fiction (in my opinion). Funny how some of those things work out.

I've started to notice how much I enjoy writing for this blog. It's a daily journal entry. I never had a journal when I was a kid. I wonder if I missed out on something. You need that push to keep writing (at least I do). This blog does it for me. Each time, I sit down with a little bit of an idea of write about. Now, that doesn't mean that everything I write is gold. Just most of it. I always wonder if someday I'm going to end up writing a post so similar to the last one that I will be accused for plagiarism. If that's the case, I hope to have at least made money off of it at that point.

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