In other news, Cass Gets Her Kicks. I've mentioned it before, but there has been some serious progress in just the last couple of days. Let me tell you about it, though.
So as you're probably aware, I'm kind of busy all day, every day, and not just with the writing. I usually manage to get half an hour at a time all to my very own self, and sometimes, I want to blow those thirty minutes on something to read. The problem is that I don't want to start a story, get into it, have to set it aside, and then waste the first precious few minutes of my next break trying to remember what happened. I want to just start reading and get a complete story in thirty minutes.
Short stories! They're perfect! Except most of them are longer than the 4,000 - 6,000 words I can comfortably read in half an hour. So fanfic, maybe? But do you know how hard it is to find good, self-contained fanfiction in the specified word count? And fanfic doesn't come on my Kindle. What I really want is short stories in that word count range that I can read on my Kindle in the bath (or in the car, or in the doctor's office). I've been looking! The closest I've come so far is a couple of Delilah Devlin singles that, frankly, are still too long.
There's a quote floating around from Toni Morrison about how if there's a book you really want to read and you can't find it, you should write it yourself. Well, I really want these stories. I don't mind if they're the same character over and over, but I don't want to have to try to keep up with the plot of a novel. I'm also much, much more comfortable with writing short stories; I've been writing as an amateur for ten years now, and if I do say so myself, I'm pretty good at it. So I'm writing them.
This is where Cass Gets Her Kicks comes in. I enjoy smut. I enjoy reading it, and I enjoy writing it--and I'm really good at writing it. That's what it is. I'll save the summaries and stuff for when it's closer to done, but the plan now is that it will be four stories, each in the 4,000 - 6,000 word range, featuring the same female character in similar situations. So far, I've drafted the first story and action-drafted the second. The third is in the plotting stage; the nicest thing about shorts is that they're super easy to plot, action-draft, and then draft and edit. I also know what's going to happen in the fourth. I know what the overall goals are, I know what needs to be done to reach these goals. I'm really, really excited about this project.
And not to put the cart before the horse or whatever, but if this works out as well as I hope it will, I plan to do something similar with another character--Father Jack--who really wants to be written but so far hasn't offered himself to any real novel ideas.
I'm still working on Strawberry Moon and making slow, steady progress, but progress with Cass Gets Her Kicks is much more tangible results already.
Speaking of tangible results and progress! I have here three different cover ideas for Cass and I would love to get some feedback on them. I had a friend help me narrow it down to just one set of options (there was an option that was the closeup of the yellow lines on a blacktop, one that was a US Highway sign, and one that featured the taillights of a classic car) and now I'd like to know what others think/what they like/what they dislike. So if you could take just a moment to look at them and leave me a comment here, on Twitter, or on Facebook, I would really appreciate it!
Version 1
Version 2
Version 3
Oh, yeah! And in order to keep my YA stuff separate from my more adult stuff, I'm planning to use the penname "Ellie Davis." Ellie because it's a phonetically-spelled contraction of "L. Le(e)" so it's close enough to L. Leona for my liking.
That's what I've been up to this week!
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