The May Project and the Muse is Running in Circles
I was stumbling around around trying to write a short story and suddenly reminded myself that my goal for 2018 was to do longer fiction. Short stories don’t sell that well. Cursed Planet, #3 in the GALCOM Universe series, is in with the copy editor.
I have ideas for at least two more GALCOM books.
And…
I’m thinking maybe I need a bit of genre diversity.
I kept circling back to mystery, because I do like mysteries. I read Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon when I was growing up. Phyllis A. Whitney was one of my favorite writers then, too. And I read Michael Connelly, J.K. Rowling, and Lee Child. In fact, it’s hard to get science fiction or fantasy in Washington, DC. The library tends to stock more mysteries.
Yet, when I wrote my first novel, it was a fantasy. My second, third, and forth were science fiction. I’ve only done two mystery short stories.
Muse is running in circles, a little panicked. I’m actually not sure why. It might be that my first novel, the Novel That Must Not Be Named, was a mystery. I had a terrible time with it. I hit that 1/3 point, got stuck, figured something was wrong with the beginning, and revised the beginning. Then I would get stuck at the same point again. Rinse, repeat.
It went on for years. Coming up with ideas was hard then. I didn’t have any other ideas that could be a novel, and besides (I told myself over and over), I already invested so much time in it. So I wandered between the novel and short stories (see the pattern? I fell into again. 
