Writing About Writing

If you're looking for the final Venice chapters you'll find them in the Oct. 23 blog post.

To the Venice Readers, today is my last email blast for a while. As I stated previously, I don‘t want to become a spammer in your mailbox. If I do a blog post on punks or any upcoming stories I may send an email with the link but that won’t be often. My weekly ramblings on my new writing venture will be confined here, unpromoted.

This will be my writing-about-writing blog. At the moment, I’m not writing. Aside from Venice tweaks, I haven’t written any significant fiction in several weeks. I’ve worked on my Sunset P.I. project but not much. So, if you enjoyed my rambling author notes every few chapters, you might like this blog.

When I’m publishing one story online, doing those eleventh-hour edits and one final inspection, it’s not easy to write another story from scratch. I have rewritten one story while publishing another. That’s doable, especially if they’re both Punks stories.

Creating new characters and stories requires immersion into the world I’m building. I have difficulty working on punk and detective stories in parallel. This is a limitation I learned of only recently. It’s like water and oil. I can toggle between tales, working on tale B as I take a break from tale A… but they don’t mix.

I’ve been managing my sudden departure from what will be known from this day forward as the nameless platform. While I have not worked on my fiction I’ve written more emails in the past ten days than I have in the past year, including my real job. It’s been a lot to manage but this is a mess I made and I had to deal with it properly as best I could.

I have resurrected this zombie dadadadio account and damned another dadadadiox. I am logged off on all devices from the nameless place creating a new zombie dadadadiox account. I’ll log in someday to check if my old chapters are still getting read but there will be no interaction. 

One of the first perks I’ve enjoyed on Wattpad is the extreme ease of publishing chapters. The first chapter requires more time as you’re writing a synopsis, creating a book cover, and providing information on a standard form that categorizes and creates the settings you desire. After that, each chapter is super easy. You give the chapter a title, paste your text into the field, and publish. It takes one minute. 

On the other platform, I had to do the same form-filling and categorizing for every chapter. In a long-form series, that is stupidly unnecessary, cumbersome work. 

On Wattpad, once I press that publish button my chapter is live. There are no gatekeepers moderating content or determining the date of publishing. This is the biggest perk of all. I can also queue up parts and date them for automatic release, one per day or every other day, whatever I please.

I cannot yet say that Wattpad is my final resting place… oops, that came out wrong, but my short time on that platform has shown me how much easier my creative writing hobby can be on a website that wasn’t designed in 1995. I once joked in an author’s note that the nameless partied like it was 1999. The moderators delayed that chapter for days until I removed the joke. They are dictators who do not tolerate dissent.

This link takes you straight to my Wattpad home. dadadadiox on Wattpad

I think you’ll immediately see how that site gives the writer a better front-facing page. That is Kat’s red 1967 Toronado on the banner image. I also like that my profile and works appear on the same screen.

Wattpad is so basic it’s sometimes an issue. They need more front page buttons, like for ‘New Releases’ or ‘Stories In Progress’. The categories are all genre-based. You have to use the search tool. 

I mentioned in my previous blog post that I am considering rewriting all my Punks Universe works, 132 chapters. That sounds like a daunting task. It won’t be for three-quarters of those chapters. The story does not need to change in All The Young Punk, Postcards, or Venice. The rewrite will allow me the opportunity to fix all the mistakes I’ve been whining about for two years and do a better job of editing. I’ll also be toning down the erotic content. That’s not a lot of work in those three series. It’s not a rewrite as much as a clean-up. 

My Punks series is where the work lies. I have regrets about that story, first is the title. I threw Punks up there with little thought and regretted it within a week… too late on that platform. You’re out of luck, locked out of editing after publishing. Not so on other sites. I’ve already made a change to WTD after publishing. 

After The Punks would have been a better title for that stage in Joe’s life but since no one had read All The Young Punks it didn’t seem right at the time.

I also regret removing Joe’s family from the story entirely. I didn’t want to introduce his sisters as young adults and then have to do background on Joe’s sibling relationships. I was writing my first erotic story. I didn’t think his family needed to be in that tale. I should have included a few scenes of his Christmas visits. I can now fix that.

The softening of the erotic content in Punks will be far more work but not a problem. It will remove many words I can use for other purposes, like his family Christmases and moving the China & Ines scenes into Punks. Those happened after he returned to NYC, so they belong in the Punk's timeline.

I can also fix the terrible decision I made in the home stretch writing stupidly long chapters that could have easily been two parts. I have a 13k and 15k chapter as well as others that are just too long. This change will add episodes to that novel and I’m okay with that.

I like my idea of a series of reunions where Joe is reconnected with old friends and lovers from ATYP and Postcards but it doesn’t have to be its own thing. Some reunions can be mixed into the Punks timeline, others would come afterward.

This writing is a good example of how I think on the page. These thoughts have been swirling in my head as I managed my exit, juggled countless emails, and got those final Venice chapters out. Sometimes my ideas don’t become fully formed until I write them down. The process of writing helps me organize and prioritize my thoughts and ideas. Once I do this a plan forward emerges and I can then write.

Here’s the problem with that Punks Universe rewrite plan. I really want to write something new, like the Sunset P.I. project as well as tales of future Joe and Tina. I love my punk characters and the story. It is by far my most ambitious project. I truly enjoy living in that world and creating more of it but maybe I’m holding myself back by focusing on my old works.

Just for the fuck of it, I carefully read and corrected errors in chapters 1 through 4 of All The Young Punks. I swear I removed dozens of unnecessary commas from each part. I made very few actual word changes. It took less than one hour per chapter and when I finished the new word count barely moved.

I don’t obsess about word count (I kinda do) but when you’re as loquacious as I am you must be aware of how long a piece of work is getting. I have written too many too-long chapters so I keep an eye on that. Whenever I open a document I inevitably increase the word count. It’s a bad habit. My ATYP test showed me I could quickly fix those old, annoying errors and refrain from rewriting and adding words.

It sounds like I’m trying to convince myself to rewrite Joe’s story and publish it elsewhere in its original R-rated form. I accomplished my goal on the other platform by writing my first erotic story. While I don’t anticipate a great deal of erotic work in my future I feel I now have that in my toolbox. I can write my emotional and psychologically focused sexual content with less emphasis on the actual sex… if I need it in a story. 

I will never regret contributing to that platform. My experience there helped me grow as a writer and the feedback from readers eased my anxieties and gave me more confidence that my work has value. I will forever be grateful but there’s no doubt that moving on is the right thing for me.

I’ve published four chapters of WTD on Wattpad now. The numbers are laughable, 26 views total, and when I publish they count me as the first view. It’s early in the game. I like the platform. I’m not surprised or discouraged. My Wattpad publishing is a trial balloon. Balloons never fly straight. Sometimes they crash land. Maybe WTD will catch a gust of wind someday.

My Venice Readers mailing list is up to sixty. A few have contacted me and stated they weren’t interested. If you don’t want updates I will remove emails, no problem. I am going dark now, incommunicado, retreating to my hidey-hole to write my NaNoWriMo 2024 detective story, the sequel to Watching The Detectives.