Cannibalizing previous work

When you've been writing for a long time you come to the realization that some of the stuff you wrote when you were young was just awful. Pure crap!

I've written two novels in the past. The first one is something that I was proud of way back in the day that I now would not allow to see the light of day. The second one is ok, but isn't on par with the kind of work I'm doing now - not to say the stories I write now are perfect but they are certainly better than my first two novels.

Another thing that many writers do is cannibalize their work, which is exactly what I've been doing with both of these works. The novels themselves are not something I want to publish, but many turns of phrase and the ideas presented in them are wonderful. I plan to use them in future works. In fact, I have already begun cannibalizing them for my current stories. Stories like that, while not publishable, are a goldmine of ideas and well written sentences and interesting turns of phrase. It's like getting ready to cook a meal and turning to the cupboards and the refrigerator and finding them full of good things to use. It's a wonderful feeling and they enhance the stories that use them.

It also let's you know that all that hard work you put into a novel that isn't publishable after all counted for something useful.

Dust and Bones (short story) is published!

I just published my newest short story Dust and Bones tonight. I'll be putting the links up tomorrow but I will put the Smashwords link up in this post. I thought that I wouldn't be able to get this done until the weekend, but as it is, I'm finished editing the story - now - and saw no reason to wait. After all, I have a lot of stories to write. I'm proud of it, I love the story and I hope people enjoy it. It's free, as well as all of my work at this point. You can download it here.

Now it's time to work on my second book in my Secret Doorway Tales series - The Pumpkin Princess.

I'm so excited!

PS. To find my work for free click on the "Published work at Smashwords" link or the My Scribd Page link in the side column.

Draft of Dust and Bones up on Scribd!

Well, once again I have something new to put up on Scribd. It's always so exciting to post a new story. I just love it. Dust and Bones is almost ready for publication. So I'll be putting up a draft on Scribd in a few minutes. Please be aware that when I post on Scribd first, the draft you see is not the final draft. It's very close but not the final one. I have three more edits to do before i will consider it finished and ready for true publication but when something is almost ready I like to give people a taste. After all, If you are anything like me, you are very impatient. When you've decided you wanted something, you wanted it yesterday!

That's how I am anyway. I don't like to wait. I finished the book cover and I'm rather proud of it, if I do say so myself. I'll also put a link in the sidebar to it. Here's the link to it. Enjoy!

And once I'm done uploading it I'm going to go on a night snack run and get a burger and a slurpee