I missed my monthly “Lakes Literary League” meeting last Thursday as I got ‘gassed’ at work with copious amounts of spray paint, and ended up going home early with a migraine. Friday was a bust, too, and today is better, but not great. We are building new offices, I may have mentioned, and one of the contractors was marking things out. Sorry buddy, a sealed building is not the place to do this.
I have a new domain for my online world, “www.imaginative-realities.com“. It is a bit long for my taste, and “imaginative” is easy to misspell, I think. But, it is something I’ve thought a lot about, it just came to me one day and I let it roll around in the back of my mind for a few weeks. The old domains still work, they just all filter into the new domain at some point. I like the www.scifi-author.com domain, and may give that out as my email address since it is shorter and easier.
The word “Imaginative” has the synonyms: Creative, Inventive, Original, Ingenious, Inspired, Artistic, Resourceful and Visionary. They are all things I aspire to in life. I can see “Imaginative Realities” as a company or brand name on a production. I like that.
The name on this post is “Novel Zero”. Although I’ve put a boat-load of time into what is “Novel 01″, I’ve been kicking around a lot of ideas for “Novel 00″ lately. Since it is a prequel to Novel 01, I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to start there or keep it as back story that I feed out to readers over time, as needed. The tipping point is whether I have enough ideas for an interesting stand-alone novel. I did start writing this novel at one point last year, and got pretty far with it. Since then I’ve had a number of other key ideas I want to weave into the story, things that are potentially important themes in future novels. I didn’t stop for lack of interest, I just got busy. I was working on both novels at various points in time. So, I’m spending a little time tonight working on note cards for Novel 00 in Scrivener.
Many female authors use their initials or a pen name for their action, thriller, or Sci-Fi novels. I’m contemplating that, too. When I was young my nick-name was “Jackie”, after Jackie Kennedy. My dad called me that forever. I’m thinking of using “Jack Connor” as a pseudonym. It seems to fit my real name, nick-name, and seems like a good author’s name. Dropping the “O” will put it earlier in an alphabetized listing, but I’m not sure how much that matters these days. I tried using my initials for my writing, but “J.R.” just reminds everyone my age of the TV show “Dallas”, and I pretty much hate that. One person said they liked JR as it reminded them of JK of Harry Potter fame. For me, initials are a tip-off that someone is not
And then, the feminist in me get riled-up and feels that I should not imply a different gender just to make it easier to sell books. Something to think about. Once I can be a role-model in fiction then perhaps it won’t matter. Like JK.