Ruckin’ With You | 10.16.16 | I Am Returned

Family vacation is over. A good time was had. But it’s over and today I deal with the looming return to work on a gloomy overcast day with some rain after a week of blue skies and sunshine. Woe is me, right? At any rate, overall we enjoyed our time in the mid-North states of Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio.

On My Mind

I arrived home with a great deal on my mind in terms of stories and writing. It seems my intense focus on the launch of my Library of Works website, RUCKERPEDIA, has got me so immersed in my past work that it’s served to inspire me on to current and future work. This past year the concept of a writer’s body of work, particularly MY body of work, has been very intriguing to me. Heck, it’s a huge reason why I built the RUCKERPEDIA website – inherently as an archive it serves as a virtual monument to my more than two decades as a writer. Essentially, were I to meet an untimely demise, well, there’s RUCKERPEDIA sitting there for WordPress, Google and Bing to offer proof, that, hey, this dude actually did a little something while he drew breath. It’s not much, but it’s something, check it out.

Currently there is a variety of nearly 30 pieces of fiction, poetry and lyrics posted, with so much more to come over the next two months. Naturally there are varying degrees of form, length and even quality. I keep everything and trust me, if I’m willing to share it publicly, then you can figure it’s probably not the worst that I have to offer. Some of it is actually worthy of publication elsewhere, and a decent handful of them were published by others at some point. But as is often the case with small press, your work is not widely circulated or worse, publications become defunct, which is the case for 90% of my previously published stuff.

But enough about the past body of work. I need to simultaneously focus on the future body of work I am building.

NaNoWriMo

In the past I have failed to commit to this annual activity an embarrassing amount of times. I really want to do it this year and work on PROJECT: DAME GAME, which is the codename for a crime/noir/romance novel that’s been percolating in my noggin for half the year. I think the pants-ing style of writing may actually benefit that particular narrative, especially since it’s a first-person viewpoint. I don’t think I could fly by my pants using my usual approach of multiple third-person limited viewpoints. For me that requires a great deal of pre-planning (i.e. outlining) and such so I can keep all the various moving parts and timelines straight. With first-person that’s an easier, more focused task. This is not to say that I won’t do a decent amount of prep work before committing to this year’s NaNoWriMo. I am a world-class preparer, if nothing else.

Serialized Fiction

I’ve been obsessed with episodic fiction ever since I was a kid watching TV and reading comic books. This is something I still strongly want to do on a periodical basis, be it in prose, comic scripts or something new I’m developing as a hybrid of both forms. And the advent of RUCKERPEDIA helps because it’s not only intended as an archival library of my works, but also a self-publishing venue. I want to start a series of some sort at the spark of the New Year. So I continue to brainstorm on that.

Collaboration

Something else I’ve been more open to of late, not just because I need artists to collaborate on graphic fiction projects, but also in terms of prose stories such as serials or novels. Not every teamup can be great and it can be a harrowing task finding those you synch naturally with, but it’s an idea I continue to entertain as a viable possibility.