Andi in the Multiverse

I'm around 30.000 words with the adventures of Andi and Elliott. No, I don't have them traveling through alternate universes. That's merely Elliott's approach to helping her assuage her conscience. I've added in Joe King and his wife, retired Philadelphia vice detectives, to track down Janie. I've started doing some serious research into the subject of human trafficking, which is even uglier than I thought it was.

I'm probably beating the horse to death on the subject of sin and redemption, and probably religion is playing a more pronounced role in my characters' lives than is currently fashionable. But without sin there can't be redemption -- we're all imperfect, some moreso than others. Andi is developing as, I think, a likable young woman with a justifiably bad conscience. Elliott has a little complexity to his nature. I don't like making my characters exceptionally rich, but he works hard and comes from a prominent family, which makes knowledge of Andi's past becoming known more of a threat. It also gives him the resources to finance the search for Janie.

As an aside. I want to pull my books from Smashwords, where they sit amidst a pile of junk -- poorly written books, gay and lesbian stuff, "erotica" (that in the heady days of my youth would have been described as pornography), fantasy, and the usual post-apocalyptic vampires. You're known by the company you keep. I'm also looking into getting them into print and marketing them in the Poconos.

Better now, I think

The ideas keep coming, lots of them discarded, but I'm writing again. I'm going to put the books I've written on Amazon, and I'm looking into their "print on demand" option. If I can handle the costs, I'll do that, which'll put my books on paper.

Del and Kenan are now on a ship off Novy Kruz, around the 80,000 word point, heading for the blowoff, if I can keep all the pieces moving right. They're about to take down one bad guy. I still trying to figure why they're not taking down the big bad guy too. I had a reason when I started this part, but I've forgotten what it was.

The book I'm working on now involves Andi and Elliott. They're meeting up after a ten year hiatus. He's a nice fellow, and Andi is a nice girl who wasn't nice in her teen years. She was her brother's personal sex toy from the time she was twelve, and he started renting her out when she was fourteen. When she was sixteen and a half she trafficked, sold off like a cow with her friend Janie, for a life hooking in Amsterdam and Berlin -- from where they could be sold off to any other destination. It's a pretty nasty background.

This demands a lot of character development. Andi's a nice, pretty, intelligent girl, who was led wrong from an early date. She carries an enormous guilt over those teenage years, both for what she did and for the loss of Janie. On a bad day, her self worth is dipping into negatives. When she escapes from her training house, which she doesn't realize was Elliott's doing, she enlists in the Army, trains as a combat medic, and goes to Afghanistan. She reenlists, trains as a practical nurse, and goes back to the 'Stan. When she's discharged, she goes to New Mexico and trains as a registered nurse. So she's actually made something of herself, trying to put the sins of her youth behind her.  Still, she doesn't date, lives a solitary life with her cat in her old student apartment. She's now scared to death of sex and by extension men.

Elliott isn't scared of sex. He's scared for Andi. He was the one who bought out her contract. He had expected to take care of her and assist her in getting her life on track. Instead, she ran off, effectively dropped off the face of the earth. He had thought she was dead, and he had mourned her for ten years, throwing himself into his own work as a micromechanical engineer working in the field of gene surgery. I'm at that point in development now. I'm hoping it will all come together in the end without too much reliance on coincidence, deux ex machina, or space aliens.

Writer's Block

I'm coming out (I think) from an extended writer's block. That doesn't mean I haven't been writing anything, just that I haven't been finishing anything. There's a difference.

I've also been reading, not so much my usual diet, but some amateur attempts, trying to compare the quality of my own writing with others. A part of that's been ego massage -- some of what I've been reading has been outright crap. There's been a continual stream of stories with too many (and too descriptive) sex scenes. There's been lot's of misplaced apostrophe's on display, pronoun approximation, and misspelings. Lots of heroines have been saved by millionaires and vice versa.

On the other hand, there have been a few that I've liked. One is Island Mine, which was recommended by a friend of mine. It's a science fiction story, nicely paced, with sympathetic characters and a nuclear blowoff. Some agent should pick it up and make some money.

How far will governments go when you have something they want? All Waylon Eckermann wanted to do was to go to college and figure out the rest of his life. It wasn't going to be that easy, not even with a little extragalactic help.

Then I read two other stories the same guy wrote and I was disappointed. I hope Island Mine is the third work, and not his first effort.

Tangent by Gina Marie Wylie is nearly as good, though it's fan fiction, using the story line of H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. It follows a man and four young girls stuck in a world where North America was settled by Indo Europeans, rather than Indians, with a later migration by the redskins so they can be battling the Aztecs.

The Mountain, recommended by a (another) friend, was a surprise, found on an erotica site. There's sex in it, but it's part of the story and it's not described stroke by stroke. It's also part of the story -- they think they're going to freeze to death. It was very well written, nice story line, and well worth the time. It's another story that should make some agent rich.

Then there are my own efforts.

Poor Del's still stuck, as they're about to chase down the criminal mastermind just as the empire is about to strike back. It's time to kill off a few sympathetic characters and I'm hesitating to pull the trigger.

When we went on vacation to Canada last year we stopped at a steakhouse. In a booth behind us there was a deaf old man who'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (he was discussing this on his phone so loudly we couldn't hear out own conversation!) So now I'm also writing Grampy, which is his story, set in about a year. He's got the death sentence, and he has a granddaughter Francine, whom he wants to marry his partner, John Ward. Frankie and Johnny don't like each other, so the romance will span the last days of Grampy's life.

Then there's the romance of Lenie and Ben Cooper, back in Palo Pinto County. I think I'm going to change their names, since I started it as a prequel to Dolly of Palo Pinto and now the characters have taken on different personalities and they're strong enough to stand on their own.

I'm also going to rewrite the first part of Mistress Peterson. Actually, I'm going to delete it. The story stands on its own without it, and parts of it would fit in Cinderella and the Devil better.