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Writing and Publishing Fiction
Nearly serious fiction related diversions for the casual or more active writer.
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Obligatory Statistically Invalid Online Poll
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The lawgiver is clear. For the fiction writer, there are no publishing shortcuts, only the slow, hard route through a reputable publishing house. The lawgiver issued down eleven seven publishing commandments, which a writer must follow: - Just as a manufacturer designs a product for a profitable target market before a single item is produced, the fiction writer must write for readers that will buy a publisher's books. Who will read your fiction? Will you write for the literary class or the masses? Will you write speculative fiction about an upside down world where man rules ape or a tale of horror about a talking man that preys on ape? Will you write a romantic tragedy of two star-crossed lovers, one gorilla and the other, chimpanzee?
Unpublished Guy's July Novel Writing Month Progress
I already exploited a loophole to rewrite a portion of one short story to meet the novel writing objectives. My thinking at that time was that if I manually rewrote the text then that should count as new words. Now, I am not sure if I need to make that distinction. After taking a second look at the FAQ, I decided that it wasn't necessary that I manually rewrite my existing writing. The FAQ addresses using an existing novel for the July novel. It doesn't say anything about short stories. If I asked for clarification, I would probably be told that existing short stories don't count to the word count any more than novels do, so I don't think I will ask. Instead, I will write with a mindset of blissful ignorance.
 Gerald Freund, fictional mouse Jakob Nielson, web usability guru.One morning (this morning, in fact) as I, Gerald Freund, was waking up from pleasant dreams, I discovered that in my mouse bedding I had been changed into the king of usablity, Jakob Nielsen. I lay on my naked back and saw, as I lifted my head up a little, my fleshy abdomen. Now that I was human sized, the blanket that had constituted my mouse bedding, just barely swaddled my buttocks and could hardly cover my body.
Unpublished Guy's July Novel Writing Month Progress
As you might have noticed, my word count has been in a bit of a holding mode. It didn't help that my bipolar, RAD, PTSD, ADD, ODD daughter poured coffee into my laptop on Sunday. (My first "Sorry for not posting but PC/laptop was in the shop" blog inactivity excuse.) Despite this setback, I have broken through the three word glass ceiling, and I have a graph to prove it.
As Minister of Science and Defender of the Faith, I exhort you to heed the Lawgiver and follow the traditional, conventional path to publishing. Preserve a way of life that has served us well for hundreds of years. Do not listen to that self-publisher, William Blake. The self-publisher should be shunned and driven out, if not destroyed outright. Beware the beastly self-publisher, for they are the Print-on-Demand publisher's pawn.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka speaks personally to me. On some levels, I can relate to Gregor Samsa. First, Gregor Samsa is a fictional character, and I am a fictional character. We were both human and then we changed. In Gregor's case, the change was a monstrous verminous bug that fits the description of a cockroach. I am now a mouse.
Gerald Freund, fictional character in mouse form  Gregor Samsa, fictional character
in verminous bug formI suppose that between the two, you might think I got the better deal. That is only natural. At first glance, many would rather be a cute white and brown mouse rather than a giant cockroach. Keep in mind, however, that cockroaches can do some amazing things like run around without a head and survive a nuclear holocaust. How well do you think you or I would survive a beheading or a nuclear winter? Not well at all.
Inspired by the John Gardner Art of Fiction exercise, "Write a long sentence," here is my latest post, a single sentence story, Now I Have a Title. (Am I ever going to shut up about John Gardner and the Art of Fiction? No, probably not.) Now I Have a Title
 n the days of Washington and Napoleon,
Before Six Sigma and Toyota Motors manufactur'd its infernal machines
according to the edicts of consistency,
I did each copy of my self-published work by hand;
If I saw a need for improvement after two or three copies were scribed,
I simply made the changes on the remaining copies, whether this meant
I was transposing words, lines, verses, pages or plates.
Truly, I was inspir'd by the Artistic & Creativity of Los, Urthona in man's form.
If hand type-setting and engraving your work is a fate you cannot bear,
Subsidy-publishing is perhaps the path for you.
Even the contrivances of the Word Processor & GBC binding machines,
Cannot make self-publishing too great a Task to contemplate
Subsidy-Publishing balances the Contraries of Mass Publishing & Self-publishing. 
Online Subsidy and Self-Publishing
source: http://online-book-publishing-review.toptenreviews.com/index.html
The fourth of July and four days into July Novel Writing Month. Four days of staring at a blank page wondering what font I should be using to write my novel. I settled on Verdana. I prefer sans serif, but it's not as overused as Arial.
Now that I have font selection settled, I have to figure out what the novel should be about. I suppose I could brainstorm, but I've decided to dredge up one of my older short stories and repurpose it as a novel length story. The particular story I had in mind was originally intended to be a multi-layered tome of symbolism like Moby Dick, except the source of my ambition was the epic poem, Jerusalem, by William Blake.
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