new story underway

I finally decided to get my sequel in gear. I wrote a funny short story some years ago at the request of my then-editor for a story for a humorous anthology of SF and Fantasy stories. I surprised myself by doing it, since I hadn't done humor or short stories at that time. I puzzled about it for a week, and then I had an idea. Like John Lennon before me, mutatis mutandis, I had an idea for a story about a man trying to write a story and getting nowhere. I got the idea from my own experience trying to write a story I had in mind about my hero, Tarkas, and how he accidentally created dragons. One day at work I had a whole bunch of ideas and wrote them all down, then started putting them into the computer that night. I think I had the story done in about a week. "Chasing His Own Tale" was published in the Wyrd Wravings anthology, short-lived and almost unknown.

Echelon Press will be bringing that story back soon, in independent e-book format, along with some others I've done in the meanwhile. This has put me in mind to create the next story in the sequence, foreshadowed in the story itself, which I'm calling "Chasing His Own Tale 2: The Inevitable Sequel". Hopefully people will get the joke.

My style is to change my style with every book/story. "If you've seen it done before, don't do it again" has been my motto since book one. Now I'm trying to deliberately recreate my own story. Not entirely, of course. Some returning characters, some new ones, recurring scenes and familiar themes (well, familiar to me, at least)--it's very strange. I have some ideas for further stories, too, a whole sequence that may be compilable into a single novel-length whole, but comedy is a hard subject to write so it may take me a while to get there.