Bonus Post

To make up for not posting last week, I'm doing a second post today. Woo-hoo! Yes, thank you the hordes of my non-existent followers applaud and cheer. Oh well. I do hope to have followers in the not-too-distant future. Maybe I'll tell some friends and family about my blog. I do hope that it spreads and that I get lots of followers because I've been hearing that this is something publishers look for. Followers on social networking sites apparently equate to free advertising to publishers. So, this brings us to the crux of the matter:

What can I do in my blog to get people to come here, and to want to come back. An author I know is planning to do a monthly contest for people to submit scenes they've written to his blog and then let other people vote on it, and then he plans to send the winners gift cards. Neat idea, but, as I said in the previous post, I'm broke. Plus I don't even have an agent yet, and he does.

I'm thinking instead I could write little short stories. The problem there is that my wife got me paranoid about plagiarism. So, that severely limits the kind of story I can put in a public place like this. The only kinds of stories I feel comfortable putting here are things that could never be published anyway, and then I'll have to make sure not to do anything particularly original in them.

So, what I'm thinking I'll do is write *shudder* fan fiction.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love fan fiction. I've written a fair amount of it in the past, and have read some that are quite good. I've also read beginnings of dozens of REALLY BAD fan fictions.

I'm doing this to give people a taste of my writing style without exposing any original ideas. Once I finish my current novel and get it copyrighted, I'll be willing to share tidbits of that, but for now I'm going to let my paranoia reign, and limit myself on here to fan fiction.

You can expect to see things in the Potterverse, the Dresdenverse, the Marvelverse, the Star Wars-verse?... Basically any fantasy or sci-fi setting that is already out there. I might even do some video game fan fiction.

Don't expect my writing style to be like anyone else's. For example if I write a story in the Dresdenverse it will most likely be in third person, though Jim Butcher always does it in first person. Also I probably will mostly use characters I make up myself rather than the main characters from the original story. Don't expect my stories in the Potterverse to follow Harry, Ron, and Hermione. They might be mentioned. I might even have my characters meet characters from the book, but the focus will be on my own characters.

Again, I'll try to do one a week, but remember that I've got a full-time job, a family, and I'm writing a novel. This isn't high priority. It's something I'll work on when I've got a few spare minutes and I need a break from my novel, so don't be surprised if I miss a week here and there. That being said, I will try to do a story every week.

So, the first one will be next week sometime.

cya

Edit: Okay. I've had some criticism that I'm not writing short stories. I guess what I'm really writing is an old school serial. It's like a novel that's released one chapter at a time. I'll try to do some actual short stories, but I generally don't think that way.