Stand-alone novels and novellas
Why not do something a bit different tonight? The stand-alone novels. *grins* I have a number of these that are, at this point in time anyway, the only book with the characters in the 'verse created for that book. One of them, in fact, is a collection of short stories that I had hoped to publish in magazines back in the day when things like that could still happen. My late father loved one of those stories so much he wanted more stories with those characters. The most ironic part of that particular story is that the idea was originally used as a fan fiction piece.
Trust me, there's no similarity between the fan fiction version and my published version. I think it played out much, much better in the published version because I was able to go even more insane with it.
There's both good and bad writing stand-alone novels and novellas. The good is that it lets you play with ideas, characters, situations, and other things you might not get to use in a series. It's fun and can be used as a challenge - as the National Novel Writing group does several times a year. I only take part in the November challenge, but I know they host at least two more during the year. The reason for that is that work is normally slow enough in November that I'm able to stay awake long enough to write for an hour when I get home from work during the week. I still do the bulk of the writing on the weekends, but that little bit helps out.
The bad mirrors the good. I've come up with characters that I absolutely hate but still have to work with because they are advancing the story better than anything else I could think of. I also like working with the series novels more because I know the characters better so I know how they are going to react to the situations I put them in. There are writers out there that will take the time to sit down and plot and graph and outline and create and have notebooks full of information prior to actually sitting down to writing their novel. I'm not one of them. I like to sit down with a blank notebook and a good pen and seeing where a vague idea will take me. I'll talk about some failures as well in later posts, because not every idea is a good one.
Probably the closest I've come is being told the ending to one of the novellas and then only being able to work on it when I was a) close to a large body of water and b) listening to a certain artist. Still not sure about that one, but I went with it, and it's actually the first manuscript I self-published on Amazon.
Trust me, there's no similarity between the fan fiction version and my published version. I think it played out much, much better in the published version because I was able to go even more insane with it.
There's both good and bad writing stand-alone novels and novellas. The good is that it lets you play with ideas, characters, situations, and other things you might not get to use in a series. It's fun and can be used as a challenge - as the National Novel Writing group does several times a year. I only take part in the November challenge, but I know they host at least two more during the year. The reason for that is that work is normally slow enough in November that I'm able to stay awake long enough to write for an hour when I get home from work during the week. I still do the bulk of the writing on the weekends, but that little bit helps out.
The bad mirrors the good. I've come up with characters that I absolutely hate but still have to work with because they are advancing the story better than anything else I could think of. I also like working with the series novels more because I know the characters better so I know how they are going to react to the situations I put them in. There are writers out there that will take the time to sit down and plot and graph and outline and create and have notebooks full of information prior to actually sitting down to writing their novel. I'm not one of them. I like to sit down with a blank notebook and a good pen and seeing where a vague idea will take me. I'll talk about some failures as well in later posts, because not every idea is a good one.
Probably the closest I've come is being told the ending to one of the novellas and then only being able to work on it when I was a) close to a large body of water and b) listening to a certain artist. Still not sure about that one, but I went with it, and it's actually the first manuscript I self-published on Amazon.
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