Writing Decisions

Decisions.  Decisions.  I seem to be doing nothing but make decisions about my writing because everything keeps changing.  The publishing world hasn't changed as much as what's going on it my head.  The more I think I know what I'm doing, the less I seem to know.

The biggest change:  I'm no longer writing to amuse myself.  When first writing about the Half-Elven of the Far Isles, I had this scene of a discontented woman standing on a cliff edge over the ocean in a gale with her long reddish hair blowing away from her head appear in my head.  Imagine my surprise when Mariah turned out to be a Half-Elven (though actually she's a true elf, but that's another story), and her daughter had just been almost killed by sea raiders.  The words flowed as I wrote about events before and after that initial scene until I had over 400,000 words.  [Chopped it into three novels plus bits and pieces.]

That opening scene and the subsequent events became the novelette that WolfSinger Publications bought for release in 2011 -- Taking Vengeance.

Now I'm fighting to write short stories ... not my strong point ... for Renna's Tales.  After struggling for a week I finally got the words flowing.  The problem.  I kept writing summaries about the action and where it fit into the long history of my Half-Elven ... rather than showing the adventure at hand.  --  This is complicated because the events Renna gossips about are forming into a novel of its own about the struggle for power after the Treaty with the Suthrons created the Marches.

I think I'm on the "write" track for the current short story now.  So, a decision ... do I continue to play with the Half-Elven ... or do I go back to the middle grade stuff I've written which has just as slim a chance of being published?

Being rather dense, I think I'll try to do both.

Another change:  I entered my website url for "free" search engine exposure.  So, I've adjusted the counter on my site.  Maybe I should have just left it with 400 viewings, but I wanted to see if the free sites made any difference in the visitors.  I'll keep you posted.  

One thing I've notice is that my traffic from foreign countries for this blog has increased the last couple weeks.  But, it's not the result of the search engines.  Their confirmations warned me that it'd be weeks before the freebies got crawled.  If I wanted things done faster, I could pay for their accelerated service.  --  I'm sticking to my orginal plan of getting some original artwork up on the site and then use the GoDaddy submission service.  [Incidently, the artwork's progressing.]