'Tis the Season

You'd think yes, but actually no....

This could quite easily double up as my end-of-year roundup, but we'll see.  Basically, we're at my Mum's for Christmas, with everything that entails, and I need to write something.

Because that's how things work now.  I write.  I've had my little tablet since just after my birthday, and if I'm honest, it's been pretty revolutionary.  I needed something that I could use in the evening while my phone was playing audiobooks to get the Chap to sleep, and something that wasn't the computer.  Computers are too easy.  They make my habits easy.  But my tablet is crap enough to make my habits really hard to do, leaving just typing stuff as the only realistic option.

And it's brilliant.  I've found an outlet for my stories that doesn't involve late nights and dangerous behaviours.  Wattpad is great.  I've found a friend.  I've got two long books about half-done, and the feedback I'm getting on each chapter is really positive.  I think that might be one of the things I need in order to keep going.  I need feedback and support, which is why my Flickr behaviours are so addictive.  I get sucked in by favourites and comments.  It's dangerous.  But not with writing.  I still get nice comments, but I can somehow manage to get to bed before midnight.

And just this month, when it looked like none of my stories would be ready for publishing, I took a short story and put it through Smashwords.  It's over there on the right, just under my profile stuff, available to buy, for something like 75p in our money.  Smashwords is also great, and I liked it so much, I wrote another short story and made it available for free.  I'm developing unhealthy behaviours with the stats page, hoping that I might crack 100 downloads before Christmas, but at any rate, I'm having a very positive experience.  The plan is to get the HGS thing in shape in the New Year and upload a chapter book for a coupla quid.

Like we're about to form some kind of
 Power Rangers Voltron Mega Zord kinda thing,
which me and my siblings could probably
actually do if it came to it

And so it is in a good place that I find myself at the end of this year.  There's a blog post to be written about what's come out of therapy recently and how it relates to my Cinderella thing, but I'll save that for another time.  Spoiler alert:  I had a horrible childhood with enough privilege to paper over the cracks.  It'll take some working through, but in the meantime I've come to spend the festive season with the very people who caused it all, and I don't feel bad at all.  These people, aside from one obvious exception, are the people who will ultimately see me through.

LMW

Mission accomplished

So, yay!  I got a story published on Smashwords, which was my goal for the year. 

Clicky-link here: Kiss Me Again or check out the fancy-pants widget over there on the right. 

Due respect to Smashwords, which is a wonderful website that really, really wants people to publish eBooks.  Also, they provide all kinds of stats and data and fancy-pants widgets to help you sell your book.

Also, Wattpad has been a revelation.  I'll write something about that at some point too.

So I'm happy now.  It was a draft that I'd had knocking around in a more or less finished form for a while, the computer geek big bum story.  It was fairly straightforward to get it formatted and uploaded to the site.  I'll need to do a bit more work on the next one, but basically, it's great, I've achieved my goal, and I'm keen to do it again very soon.

Also, sold a copy, which makes me feel legitimate.  This is important for me.

LMW

Blindsided

This song.  Just...

Stephen Fry did a documentary about Wagner, in which he said there are times when he wonders what the hell he's doing with his life when the only thing that's worth doing is spending all one's time listening to Wagner.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the same is true with Leonard Cohen.  I'm beginning to think the same might be true of Iron and Wine.

Also, this song is about mothers and sons, so obviously it strikes a chord there (Em-C-G-D if you're doing it properly, or Am-F-C-G if you're on the ukulele and you want the noodly bits (I always want the noodly bits))

I think I'm far from killing the last snake in the creek bed, but I think I've made it up from the bruise on the floor of this prison, and the creek has certainly drunk the cradle she sang to.

So, therapy's going well, work is going better, family is good enough to be expecting another child in 6 months' time, and the writing looks like it could be a really useful thing for me to deal with my fantasies.

I now have two stories up and running on Wattpad, 13 people following me, and one very wonderful person who is happy to message me on a more or less daily basis.  I'll write a proper post about it all when I have some time, but basically, writing yay.  Check out my stories:  A Question of Faith and Stupid

LMW

There's a draft in here...

Except this is a short story, not a big book

This is exciting.  I have a draft, and it's now a revised draft that I'm happy to spread about.

I'm also happy to spread it about freely, because I'm fairly sure I'll be giving it away for free when I come to properly publish it via the proper publishing thing I'm looking at.  First one's always free, and if I can get more than 2 people to download it, I'll count that as a win.

Clicky link here for the revised draft.

It's just shy of 5k in terms of words.  I think that's not too shabby.  You can read it and leave it at that, and I'd really welcome some feedback, mostly on the whole 'doctor' 'Dr' issue that presented itself.

Of course, there's a back-story and a trail of inspiration which might give you a window on how my mind works these things out.  Read on below, with spoilers...

Updates and writing

Excerpt, excerpt, read all about it!

Chapter 10 is well underway, and my genius idea for this chapter is that it's all dialogue.  It's mostly a world-building exercise, with a few hints at a couple of things that are coming.  It's the Supervisor character talking on the phone to various young ladies and various submissives, arranging a month's worth of home visits between the two.  If you're new to the premise of my current work in progress, a good place to start is here.

So yes, the Supervisor's job is to arrange these home visits between young ladies and submissives, which involves a lot of telephone calls, which means I can write the whole thing as dialogue.  By this point in the chapter, the Supervisor character has already spoken to 3 young ladies (one of them twice) and one of her submissives, weaving a complicated web of offers, dates, and callbacks.  This particular excerpt is between her and a female submissive called Melissa who likes to serve as a maid.

New character

Impossibly lovely though she is,
my new character doesn't really
look like this young lady

Chapter 5 is written, but it needs a lot of work.  It's over twice the length of any of the other chapters so far, and while I realize that that shouldn't really be an issue and that chapters length is pretty much anything you want it to be, it is an issue for me, because of the way I do things.  I'm also loath to split it into two chapters, because of the way I'm doing things in this book.  I don't have to do things that way, but that's the way I'm doing it, because of the way I do things.

I won't rework Chapter 5 now, because that way lies madness, so it's time to get excited about introducing a new character in Chapter 6.  I (probably) won't post an in-depth fanfare for all new characters, but this one in particular will hopefully show a bit more about what sort of book I'm writing.

She's also interesting because I know exactly what she looks like.  Read on?  Read on.

Writing updates

Not too dissimilar to
the intended cover
picture for my meisterwork

I'm writing, and it's good.

Chapter 3 was hard-going because of the subject matter, then Chapter 4 turned out slightly differently than I had imagined.  Instead of a quick talky bit and the introduction of a new character, it turned out to be rather emotional and romantic.  There was even a fire, and something happened that I didn't plan to happen until halfway through book two.  It just made sense at the time.

This then bumped the new character into Chapter 5, which is well underway, and actually makes my book pass the gender-swapped Bechdel test.  I have more than one male character and they talk to each other about something other than the main female character.

Of course, I still need to pass the actual Bechdel test, but in a book about a society that arranges weekend visits for young, dominant women in the homes of submissives, I'm obviously going to be including a lot of female characters.  Chapter 6 is when we start to meet them, so there's that.  More details on that when I have them, but the writing is certainly going well as of today.

Stay tuned, because after the jump we have a woman wearing leather boots and excerpt from Chapter 5.  Oooo.

I have a page now

I now have an author page on Smashwords.  You should go and have a look at it.

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lmwilliams

Sadly no books yet, but there's some bumpf about what sort of stories I intend to write.  Also some teasers about a different sort of content, which I remember writing about here.  Time to start a Sissy Party tag for the blog.  I've already got one for the HGS, so...

Interested parties should explore the Smashwords site.  It looks like a good platform.

LMW

This is now the blog

I have redesigned the blog, as you can no doubt see.  This is now the blog.

I've kept the old blog where it is, but marked it very clearly as the Old Blog.  If you scroll through a list of posts, it'll tell you that a post comes from the Old Blog, and if you're viewing a single post it'll give you a little box at the top, just like the Eye Candy posts do.  I can make my blog do all that, because code.

And now my first post is looking very prescient, as I've removed the wonderful picture from the sidebar.  But yes, this is now the blog.

New me

I live, I die, I live again.

I am trying a new thing.  The old thing (effectively this blog up until now) was not really working.  It was getting out of hand, particularly with the Eye Candy series and the endless fiddling that that entailed.  It was becoming yet another of my secret, private projects, elaborate, highly engrossing, and shared with absolutely no-one.

My new thing is elaborate, highly engrossing, and shared with anyone who wants to buy it.  I'm writing ebooks with a view to getting them distributed to loads of places where people can read and pay money for them.

I'm not aiming to make mega-bucks, but the money thing is important for me.  This is not another of my pet projects that ultimately goes nowhere.  This is all above board.  Furiosa knows, and is supportive, although she doesn't actually want to read any of it.  Too weird, and I agree.

This is a legitimate repository for all the kinky things that go on inside my head.  The things go on, it's impossible to stop them going on.  This is a way I can do something with them that doesn't end up going nowhere.

It's exciting.  I've written two chapters of my first trilogy already.  I've got a second trilogy mostly planned, plus a third idea that I tried to write about before but purged in a fit of self-recrimination.  I've also got ideas for a side-line in single-player creative writing role-playing game systems, because that's something I'm really good at making, and nobody seems to be doing that on the internet yet.

My new hobby is taking over this blog, for promotional stuff, chapter samples, updates and links.  Don't worry, I'll still write posts about my personal quest for submissive self-acceptance.  It's still going to be part of this blog because it's still part of me, and exploring it will fuel my writing the very activity exorcises my demons.  Cases in point:  my first trilogy is about work, and my second will be about my first fiancée.

Stay tuned.

LMW