The Next Project (Jason's first post in *how* long?)

I just finished writing a rough draft of another book a week ago. Typically, in my writing life, I've noticed that it takes me about 7-14 days after such an achievement to be up for doing any other creative work. Instead, I ponder what I'll do next. Ideas bounce around in my head, every one gaining massive amounts of traction and then fading to nothing when I don't start writing immediately. But it's been a week now, and I'm getting the itch again, and so I've got to get writing.

I'm thinking something shorter than a novel. I've got an agent to sell those now; what I want is something I can publish myself, put out and sell right away. (The money's nice on traditional publishing. The waiting isn't.) I've got a few ideas, one that I'm working on with Peter is to put together a pair or trio of novellas with a particular (perhaps secret? Don't know so won't say it) theme. I'm thinking it'll end up in the 15-20K word range. But there are other novella length things that I contemplate.

I have the start of a novella about the later years of Morgan le Fay, sitting at about 10K and needing probably 30K. That's too short for traditional publishing, too long for magazines, the perfect length to self publish. I love the Arthurian legends, and I've been meaning to finish this thing for a great many years. When I started it (so long ago was that date) it seemed like it would be a great achievement to finish it. I have advanced much beyond that point now, but I still want to get back to it and wrap it up.

Or I could write an interpretation of the myth of Orpheus that's bouncing around in my head. I think it's just a little too thin to be a novel length work; it would be a good novella, but just not meaty enough for more.

Or the sci fi piece about abandoned terraformers. Again, it's too thin for a novel, but probably more than enough to get to 20K words.

All together, those four would be about 80K words, or about the length of the novel I just wrapped up. So that wouldn't really take long, and it would be four pieces of work that I could do things with promptly.

I think I like that plan. I think I'm on it.