I'd never written a short story before being asked to contribute to The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2. Okay, I did have a short story writing class in college, but a 10-page story is very different from a 25 to 50 page story. Also, I'd written a novella, but again, the word count requirements were hugely different, and writing different lengths of story take different writing muscles. At least IMO.

So I was asked to write a story for Vampire 2 and I said yes. And thought, OMG, how do I tell a story in such a short space? I bought the original Mammoth Vampire Romance book and read a couple of the stories. They seemed to mostly be vignettes rather than full stories and I thought, okay, I can do that.

A funny thing happened, though, as I wrote Blood Feud. First of all, I did end up with a full story. It was short, but it had a beginning, middle, and end. The second thing I learned was that I enjoyed writing short stories. Well, huh. I never would have guessed this. I write long, routinely coming in well over my word count total. When my contracts have minimum word requirements, I can't help but smile. Minimum isn't a problem for me--what's my maximum word count? ;-)

But I discovered short stories have a rhythm of their own and it's one I enjoy dancing to. I knew I wanted to write more and then I had this idea hit me. It was a great for a story, but the problem was it wasn't substantial enough to support 400+ pages. Sure, I could add other stuff to it, but it would dilute the original idea.

It was, however, the perfect type of idea for a short story.

About the same time, my agent and I discussed getting more of my work out there more frequently and Nocturne Bites came up. I put together a proposal for my idea--about 10 pages and a 3-page synopsis--and we sent it off. It sold! So look for another short story set in the same world as Blood Feud from Vampire 2. It will be out probably in the first three months of 2010 and I'm working on coming up with title suggestions. I'm really bad at titles.

I'd been focusing my world building efforts on the heroines and their people, but I realized this morning that I also needed to focus on the bad guys. They're part of a different society and I knew nothing about them beyond some nebulous idea of evil. (In our opinion, of course. The bad guys have a completely different perspective on their actions.)

One of the things that surprised me a little bit was how learning about my villains helped me learn about the good guys. But maybe it shouldn't have because my heroines' jobs exist in large part because of a need to battle these beings.

The other thing that I'm finding interesting about the world building is that I feel like I'm missing something. I can't figure out what it is and I can't think of anything I'm at least not mulling over, but it just feels like there should be more parameters I look at. But then maybe I'm looking at it from a futuristic world building perspective and thinking that this is less intensive than that. I don't know, but it's bothering me because I hear about "elaborate" world building and I don't feel as if I've done that, and yet, I cant see anything that's missing.

I'm going to continue letting this play in the back of my mind, but my focus is shifting to my characters and the stories now. I usually get the handle on my h/h first and I don't have that yet--which might be part of why I feel unanchored. I also need to continue doing research. When I first had this idea come to me, I picked up some books that I thought would help and now I need to read them.

Character names are important and luckily my heroes and heroines almost always tell me who they are and I just move forward. My heroines did that and the first hero shared his name. The other two weren't nearly as forthcoming, but I did some looking and came up with a couple that felt as if they might work. Hero number 2 did, indeed, fit his name. Hero number 3, well, I have his name wrong. He made that clear over this past week. That means more time trying to pin him down and get it right.

I also need to find pictures of hero 2 and hero 3. Character pictures are big part of pre-book for me. And I guess that's where I am. Pre-book. It seems weird since I haven't worked on so many multiple proposals one after the other in a few years and I was just in pre-book.

This weekend I watched the latest Star Trek movie starring Chris Pine as James T. Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock. This movie is a prequel to the original television series and was released in May 2009, so I'll try to avoid spoilers.

The movie opens with an attack that didn't make sense to me at first, not until I realized it was a kind of prologue. The movie really gets started when Jim Kirk gets into a fight with some Star Fleet personnel in a bar. Captain Pike stops it and convinces Kirk to join Star Fleet. He does--of course--and we follow his adventures as he meets Uhura, Bones McCoy, Spock, Chekov, Sulu, and Scotty. There's a bad Romulan out there fighting Star Fleet and Kirk finds himself thrust into command through a set of circumstances no one could have foreseen.

I loved this movie! I honestly didn't expect to since I've found most of the Star Trek stuff kind of boring since the film where they rescued the whales. Was that Star Trek #4? But this was totally awesome!

It started off with a bang and never lost momentum anywhere. I found the movie fresh and fun and the portrayals fit, something that surprised me because the characters of Kirk and Spock are so set by Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner. The movie was high energy and fun and it seemed as if the cast was having fun, too.

I seriously only have one nit with the entire movie and that's the time travel aspect that changes everything. I think this was a cheat because the writers didn't want to deal with the parameters they'd been given in the series, but by sending a Romulan back in time who changes things before Kirk is born, now they can do whatever they want with Star Trek without worrying about breaking canon with the series. This does bug me, there's no reason why this film couldn't have honored the pasts/setups done in the series, but whatever.

Everything else about the movie was awesome and I'm going to buy a copy so I can watch it again and again when the mood strikes.

My rating: 5 Stars (And two enthusiastic thumbs up!)

I don't usually post videos, but this one is too good not to share. It covers a lot of my geekiness with both Star Trek and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If you look at related the related videos, you'll see another one that's a mash-up of Star Trek and The A-Team. That one's pretty good, too, but the Python one is my fav.

I've learned a few things in the past couple of weeks about world building. I've done it for futuristic, including a proposal that I put aside and never pursued very hard, and I find this comfortable to do. Maybe because I can look around and extrapolate what I think the future will be. Or at least one possible version of it. The proposal that's sitting on my hard drive had some pretty interesting world events, including a water shortage among other things. That, unfortunately, I can see happening far too easily--but I don't want to talk about the real world or potential future problems.

I've also done world building for my Light Warrior series. But by and large, the Gineal live within human society and their council and magic is merely an extra layer. Their world is somewhat different, but not hugely so because their focus is to blend in and remain unnoticed. Yes, they have a council that rules them and their own particular societal hierarchy, but their world is much more a part of ours than separate from it. This is deliberate, BTW, so if anyone is expecting some hugely elaborate world building, it isn't happening in this series.

Besides it was Ryne who did the world building here. When she first came in, she talked for weeks nonstop about her people and told me nothing about herself until later. I had the basics of the world down before I had just about anything else, including her name or who her hero was.

But now I'm world building a very different society, one that operates on completely different rules and paradigms. Unlike futuristic world building, I can't look at now and project forward in time. In fact, I wasn't even certain what questions I needed to ask, but I had a couple of friends come through with suggestions and I've been thinking about them. What I'm finding is that it's complicated.

I'm still mulling, but yesterday the heroine from book 1 began to explain a few aspects that I hadn't considered, things associated with the job her "people" do. The thing that's interesting to me is that I didn't realize I needed this kind of information until she started sharing it. Why did she have to go into detail, though, on the commute home? It's not like I can write while I'm on the freeway and I don't own a digital voice recorder. I kept talking about getting one, but never quite did it. I hear the iPod Touch has one of those, though. Doesn't that make it a writing-related expense? ;-)

The other interesting thing about all this? I had this idea more than 2 years ago, but I was already committed to working on the proposal for Edge of Dawn. For all this time, the characters have largely been quiet. Mostly distant, even, but now they're awake. Well, at least the first hero/heroine are. I also have a handle on the second and third heroines, but their heroes are still vague. Working on that along with the world.

Back to mulling.