Writers Gone Wild Forum What's everyone working on?

Go on, spill a few of the beans about what you have in the pipeline. Give us some teasers! I know this has been kind of touched on in the introductions thread, but this time around, you can talk a bit more about plots or what not.

While I have numberous half-dead (or is it half-alive?) short stories sitting around, I am spending most of my time working on a new novella, called The Corpse Eaters, which is the tale of a small town where it always rains, with a cemetery whose dead are washing to the surface, along with the creatures that feed on them. A few secrets are coming to the surface, as well.

One I just started yesterday, out of the blue, is called Mastication, a Love Story (for now), and it's about a food magazine editor with an aversion to chewing, a photographer with fetish for it, and a self-destructive romance.

I'm also trying to resurrect a novella I tried a year ago called The Within Unknown. I don't have any teasers as to what it's about, because I'm completely re-tooling it. However, the first chapter can be read on my WritersCafe profile. I also have a multi-POV, drug-induced faux-bizarro zombie novella called A Week Before Doomsday.

Eventually, I am going to try to put together a chapbook of macabre children's poetry written for adults, along the lines of "Fred Knew He Was Dead" on my profile.

I want to flesh out my story "Rage of Angels" and start submitting it. It's a tale of the archangel Gabriel killing humans in vengeance, the demon who tries to align himself with Gabriel for his own grandiose plans, three archangels sent to stop Gabriel and the police detecives trying to solve the murders. Of course, I threw in a thought provoking end about how God works and the message he wants one of the detectives to deliver just to make everyone think.
Currently expanding on "Turning Tables" a spy novel about a CIA operative who finds herself in some unusual situations and has to rely on her wits to overcome some huge obstacles while trying to maintain her sanity after the shocking opening sequence.
I've got "Law of the Pack" my werewolf novel on hold for now. Some of the exerpts are posted. "Bane", and "Law of the Pack 1 & 2" are parts to be incorporated into it. Still trying to get "Sempiturnus", my demon hunter novel picked up after self publishing hasn't produced stellar results. "Ambulat" and "Luna Niger" are the follow up novels that are needing a little edit work, but pretty much ready to go. Whew! Okay, I'm done.

I'm working on fleshing out my short story "The Dying Season" (found on my Writers Cafe page) and turn that into a novella. I'm hoping to have it done so I can start putting it out there and possibly have it picked up for publishing.

Last night I started a short story for a contest in one of my groups. The topic is "Mirrors"(I still haven't read Masterson's "Mirror" but I did pick it up at the used bookstore). I'm trying a very different approach to writing this story. I'm taking a page out of Poe and Lovecrafts book. I do believe they were much much smarter than me with their writing, but it's fun to try.

And of course I'm working on putting together a horror short story anthology called "Tales to Fuel Your Nightmares: A Collection of New Horror." I'm putting it out through Lulu.com and it will have several of the Cafe's horror writers featured in it as it's a contest on this site.

Hey everybody!

Well, I've been a busy bee. Two kids in school, one just starting out, and one still at home, plus job hunting, and some issues at home. But I'm pleased you've been active in my absence.

I am working on getting a few more short stories published, editing my series, The Nymph Bemused, and writing a new short story, I haven't decided on a title for it yet. I've also been working on a newsletter for the group, one I think would be nice to catch up those of us who have been so busy with everything, they've been missing out.

Sorry I haven't been on much lately, but I'm hoping to get everything settled down here, then you'll be hearing from me a lot more.

Just how Wild... is Wild -- don't answer that, it was a rhetorical question... lol



Anyways, I am working on a vampire story with elements of traditional vampire lore in the style of Bram Stoker... well at least an attempt at the style. Meaning diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, etc.



I had a very hard time deciding on the form the writing should take, ie first person, third person etc. and also I had so many ideas it was hard to sort out which direction the plot should take.



I have written about six thousand words with three different starts... it really has been like pulling teeth to get this story out.



PS. Hi Kelli... been missing you

What am I working on, hmm...

Of course, I've so many things I'm working on it's a little hard to think of them all!

I took part in a "horror battle" in a group here on the cafe and the prompt we were writing about was Easter Egg Hunt. I started a story for it, got to 7 pages, then the computer malfunctioned--I still have no idea what happened!!--and I lost all but 2 pages, even the backup copy was screwed up and it's in a separate drive! So I started rewriting it, and realized after the day or two extension I got that it was about 2,000 words over the limit. I realized this at 3am I think Thurs. or Fri. night last week and so I wrote a new short story based on the larger story. It was about 3,000 words long. And now the longer story has continued and I'm tying in the character from the short story into the longer story and it's turned into a novella, and I'm hoping to have it finished within a week, maybe two. Just depends. Sorry that explanation was so long, but the teaser is:

Rabbit Colored Dreams (the long story): A man has recurring nightmares about rabbits and speaks to a voice in his head that logic tells him is his conscience, but his heart says isn't. He is plagued by his abusive mother and this voice which preys on his weaknesses and low self-esteem. Eventually, the voice, which while harsh is still his friend, helps him decide to prove to the world his theories on the rabbits in his dreams and what really happens to the children who die on Easter day across the nation. ("Rabbit's Den" the short story I wrote ties into this, where Christie and Simon, siblings, are at a festival where Simon dies in order to save his sister from a blood-thirty demonic rabbit). The story will also tie in with a series of shorts (or longers, lol) that I've started which catalogue Bahulia--a pagan god of chaos and consequences, miscreants and malformations, rage and revenge. He is a god worshipped by the downtrodden and unknown and through him, for him, they take their revenge on the world.

With Bahulia is another longer short story called "The Bridge Game". An old woman speeds down a busy street, cutting through parking lots, nearly hitting mothers and children, to arrive at her friends house for the weekly bridge game. It's revealed that the women have planned a surprise for her that night and that her friends are actually a coven of older women who are going to either initiate Josephine into their coven or use her for their means. I had this image of an old lady speeding like a demon down the road and a group of old women surrounding a card table, eating a fest of human flesh. For what purpose? I dunno yet, but it's gonna be crazy.

Untitled work about the "Monster in the Closet". This work is still highly in the preliminary stages, only a few pages written, but I have a clear idea of where I want it to go. It's loosely based on my two toddlers, and their interactions. I find it interesting that they maintain conversations using some words I know, and words I don't. In this story, they are on a quest to find their mother, who disappeared in the closet during a game of hide and seek. This will definitely be a novel rather than a short story, and I particularly love this because my daughter, Alex, calls her big brother, Mikey, "Deiya" and I have no idea why. She's always called him this and I constantly wonder, will she keep calling him that? The story really digs down into the relationships between very young kids--how they are far smarter than we believe--and their constant frustration at their incommunicability with adults.

Shadowed Secrets: A woman must face the monster under the bed and come to terms with the knowledge that it is the killer of babies (also known as SIDS) and defeat it to keep her sanity. --perhaps a novella, but for now is in the longer short story range and is unfinished. It's only unfinished because it's begun to delve into emotions I'd rather not face too much yet, it puts a lot of myself out there and that's a tough thing to do.

To Dallas and Back Again, A short-persons tale: Basically, it's exactly what it sounds like. A semi-parody on The Hobbit, but is mostly a nonfictional account of my hazardous journey into Dallas, TX, to drop my husband and son off at the airport for a trip to the inlaws--and how I managed to make it out alive. Delve's into a semi-neurotic, crazy person's fears and perceptions.

Carnival of the Macabre: Zombie carnival is all I've really got for this one for now. An idea I started writing, got a few pages into it, and got distracted on other works, but I just couldn't shake the image of a dirty looking clown with a busted tophat and holes in his clothes pointing to a rickety old Ferris Wheel with a sign hanging before it, missing some of the lightbulbs to complete it, reading: Wh el of To ture".

Ah, and finally, Remnants is the working title for the last piece that's "in the works", so to speak. It's about 20 pages into it and explores a man's promise with the Devil and the consequences if he does not complete his part of the bargain. Includes this scene I just love of the man going to the bathroom and pissing while shadows converge beneath his feet and around him, crawling up his legs and going in for the attack--he has just seconds to zip his johnson up or it'll be gone. I think that's a very vulnerable place for a guy, for a woman in the ladies room..

Yep, so that's what I'm working on. Not including the editing and rewrites I've got going, this is all the current work that is 'unfinished', that the story has not yet been told on.

I'm working on a couple of things

One is a book I'm very excited about called "Undiagnosed". I've posted the prelude and the first chapter on my page. Check them out when you have some time to read and let me know what you think.

The second is a collaboration between me and some of my photographer friends that showcases my poetry and their photos. Hopefully it will be out sometime before next summer.

Well...currently working on two projects.

Shadows and Secrets is my horror novel. Have a few chapters posted and it is still in the rough stages as I am still toying around with a few ideas on the direction I want to take it. I have my setting pretty much set and my main characters are coming together nicely. Just not sure how I want to proceed. Too many damn good ideas hitting me at once.

     My other project. The Crimson Knights is a sci-fi/fantasy novel...a bit on the dark side. As I am just putting chapter one together it is still really rough. Hope to have some more info soon.