The following is a very early draft of a chapter from a book I’m writing with Tom Abba. Think of it as a couple of academics/creators trying to help other creators avoid all of the dumb mistakes they’ve made. It’s very early stages still but all feedback welcome (send them to baldur.bjarnason@gmail.com or to Tom, if you can dig up his contact details somewhere. Probably on his twitter. Or his home page.
(This is the third Stumbling into Publishing post.)
The project idea was simple: write and publish a series of novella-length ebooks.
The reason was even simpler: to learn about ebooks and publishing.
I had a few requirements at the start.
I was only going to put together four to six stories. Not just for my sake, but also for the reader. I wanted to make sure that the reader had an end in sight.
One of the guilty pleasures me and my sister have is our enjoyment of crap TV, usually chatting on IM as we do, shaking our heads at the crap we’re watching.
—OMG, I can’t believe X did Y to Z.’
—I know! That is sooo out of character, the writers must have it in for X.
And so on.
Last year Grimm and Warehouse 13 served the purpose nicely. Mostly inoffensive silly fun.
[caption id=“attachment_532” align=“alignnone” width=“600”] Under the glacier[/caption]
The germ of the idea behind ‘Loot, kill, obey’ comes from two sources, one literary, one from real life.
The literary germ is going to be obvious to you once I mention it: Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. Specifically the scene with the wreckers towards the end.
Of course that led to a bunch of research that revealed how the whole scenario doesn’t really work, you’re more likely to wreck a ship by turning off a real lighthouse than by erecting a fake one.
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