Word Pursuit-Jason G. Anderson

I’ve been interviewed again! Two interviews have gone live this week.

The first interview is over at Indie eBooks, a new site run by Nadine Earnshaw that has just started up. The second interview is over on Tales and Troubled Times of a Hungry Author, run by Roberto Scarlato. Both interviews feature “The Outsider” as the book I’m talking about.

Thanks to both Nadine and Roberto for interviewing me.

The other day I had a small realisation about The Vampire Drabbles. I had submitted it to a horror website (another author was featuring horror books to his visitors), and I said the book contained only the killing and blood sucking type of vampires – no friendly, sparkly, vegetarian or “oh, woe is me” types.

Then I looked at the cover, and realised it doesn’t say that at all

So I’ve changed the cover to something a bit more indicative of the contents. I may end up changing it again in the future (or at least tweaking it), but for the moment we’ll see how this goes.

The new cover is below.

One of the killers for any sort of project that you do in your own time is the lack of a deadline. If there is no time limit for when something has to be done, you’re relying on yourself to get it done in a reasonable time.

For some people this isn’t a problem. They’re self-disciplined enough to get the work done in a reasonable time. But for the rest of us, we’re not so lucky

Challenges like Round of Words in 80 Days (ROW80) are fantastic for helping to set goals with a time limit. However, I realised I needed something a bit more solid. To give myself even more incentive to complete the writing I need to do.

So yesterday I made several bookings with my editor (Red Adept – she rocks). I’ve booked editing time for short stories at the end of April, May, June and July, and I’ve also booked in Gears of Wonderland for editing in late August.

My hope is that with solid deadlines to get things done by, it will kick my brain into “gotta focus” mode. NaNoWriMo was fantastic for this, and with any luck this will have a similar effect.

What are the short stories about? No idea for the most part I do know they will all be Atomic Wasteland Tales. But aside from the story that’s due in April, I can’t tell you much more than that.

Fingers crossed something comes to me by the time I’ve finished the current short story

I haven’t been blogging much thepast month or so, and the main reason boils down to the title of this post. What is the purpose of this blog?

When it comes right down to it, I want this blog to be a way for me to interact with my readers (admittedly that’s only a handful of people right now, but I hope that will slowly change in the future ). To have a place to be me, and hopefully show that there is a person “behind the book”. But for a while, I had lost sight of this.

Instead, I had begun to think that this was a blog about writing. Why? Well, I like to write. I like to read about writing. I see a lot of blogs about writing. So that means that since I have a blog, I should write about writing. That makes sense, right?

The only problem with that thought is that I don’t have a lot to say about writing! I’m not an expert at writing in any way, shape or form (hell, half the time I can’t remember the difference between a noun and a verb ), so for me to post about writing seems a little hypocritical.

And because I had begun thinking that this was a blog about writing I had stopped posting, since I was always worrying about whether I had anything useful to say.

While I can’t promise that I’ll have anything useful to say on other topics, I do want to update this blog more regularly. So, starting today I will be. From time to time I will talk about the process of writing (it’s something I love to do after all), but I’ll also be adding more of a personal slant to the site and talking about other things. Plus I’ll return to posting the occasional review, since I like being able to point readers to books I enjoyed. After all, I’m a reader too.

So, to summarize my rambling: Not posting bad. Will post more often.

(Geeze, to think I could have just posted 7 words instead of this entire post )

My short story, The Outsider, is finally available on Amazon (and coming soon to Smashwords, and everywhere that Smashwords distribute to).

The Outsider is the first story in a series I’ve called “Atomic Wasteland Tales”. It’s a post-apocalyptic setting, many decades after a nuclear war that wiped out the majority of the world’s population. The stories (at least initially) aren’t linked in an overarching  sequence, but there will be recurring characters and places appearing through them.

So what is The Outsider about? From the Amazon description:

Jacob Harkins knows that outsiders are forbidden to enter Raventon, but when a dying man collapses at the town gate, he can’t turn his back. Little does he know, he’s just set off a much larger chain of events…

The Outsider is a short story (6365 words, about 19 novel pages). Edited by Lynn O’Dell (Red Adept Reviews).

I hope you enjoy it. Buy it now from Amazon.