Royce's Random Thoughts

Summary: Middling month. CotRV and PoW remained steady sellers, though I only got one overseas sale. The big news is that I finally finished writing Shadow of the Red Vixen and have finally completed editing it. It's now for sale on Amazon for $2.99, and for now Captive of the Red Vixen is available as a free promotion through Amazon Prime (where it's been going pretty fast).

Things to Do: I'm skipping NaNoWriMo this year, but I'm going to take the time to poke at Warbird to see if I can't bring it back to life. Otherwise the plan is to try and plot out Legacy of the Red Vixen and write enough stories in the For Your Safety 'verse to create a themed anthology.



Sales Report:


Captive of the Red Vixen: 9

For Your Safety: 5 (1 DE)

Good Landing: 23*

Prisoners of War: 6

Teal's Choice: 1

The Dragon's Companion: 1

Unexpected Diversions: 1

Total Paid Sales: 22

* Free ebook

Since Firefox was published 35 years ago and the Clint Eastwood adaptation is almost as old [1] I'm sure an update/homage wouldn't be unreasonable.

The major change is that, now that the Soviet Union is kaputski, the action would move over to China, and instead of a PTSD suffering Vietnam War vet as the protagonist it would be a ex USAF female Chinese American [2], who was adopted from China when she was ten years old or so (and therefore retains full native accent Mandarin language skills). Most of the tension of the in the first part of the novel would be a Will She/Won't She tug of was as the protagonist is torn between ditching the mission or going through with it, since the latter would mean she'd never be able to return to China again.

Tech wise, the old Firefox stealth MacGuffin is a bit passe (and a Mach 5 capable interceptor is just silly). Speed would be a more reasonable-with-current-tech Mach 3 (improving on the old MiG-25 Foxbat's capabilities), but it would still retain the thought controlled weapons and rear defense pod. Not sure if I'd want to go with active camouflage though. That's been seriously overdone in the movies.

[1] Age, I show it.

[2] Possibly the same one from Warbird if I can fiddle with her background a little.

I'm not giving up the story, mind you. Warbird is coming along nicely in the plot department, but I'm giving up on the idea of trying to hit 50k words by the end of the month. I'm just too tired and distracted to try and keep up with the required daily word goal, and when I only got less than five hundred words in yesterday it made me feel sick to my stomach.

That's wrong. This is supposed be a challenge yes, but it's also supposed to be a fun challenge, and right now it isn't fun. So I'm stopping here and giving myself a break. I will finish the story, but I'm not going to bend myself into a knot meeting an artificial deadline.

I'm sorry for all the people who were rooting for me and who are probably disappointed now, but from the way I feel my stomach unknoting even as I write this, I know it was the right thing to do.

Made my word count today by just four words. Which wouldn't be too bad, except I'm getting the horrid feeling my story is going to fall well short of the 50k word mark. May have to make up for it with something Tez & Maria or perhaps chaypeta's annual Christmas fanfic.

Have not hit daily minimum today. Not sure I'm going to be able to, thanks to exhaustion brought on by a nasty cold and Tom having a major meltdown this afternoon mostly from the time change. Blah.

Running behind again, mostly from waking up "late" at 4am. I'm definitely going to have to play catch up this weekend, children willing

Alex has a talk with her dad about her future job prospects and then heads back home to China.

Daily Word Count: 1794

The lunches are made, the PS3 is off, the laptop is charged, and I have nothing to do at this point but write (and waste time making LJ entries).

Starting Word Count: 2122
Goal: 52122

Here we goooooo...

Okay, so three episodes into The West Wing I can safely say their Secret Military Space Shuttle story has absolutely no resemblance to my Secret Military Space Shuttle story.

Unfortunately I'm now hooked on The West Wing, after having previously given up on episodic television. Which is more than a little annoying since the DVD release doesn't bother with English closed captioning, which is a problem given Georgia's motormouth and my dislike for cranking the volume up. And I'm starting at the end.

Had some quiet time this morning and got another page of the first chapter down, as Our Heroine deals with a defaced wikipedia article. If I can get it finished this weekend I'll yank the previous post I made on the beta site and just repost the entire chapter.

Meanwhile Netflix apparently isn't streaming the West Wing. I thought they were but either they pulled it or I was imagining things. Backup plan is in place though, with moonshadowed using her l33t libriarian skilz to get the DVD's for me.