Publicity and Feeding the Gators

In the name of publicizing my work, I've been exploring options available on the Internet sites I'm already set up with: Facebook, Google, Goodreads, Twitter, Authors Den, and this blog site. Really leaning on the Twitter aspects. The more people I follow on Twitter, the more they follow me back, and I've started putting out a daily Tweet about "Dabblers" with a quote from the story. Perhaps that will lead people to buy the book, but in any case, the exposure is free.

I once again find myself in that between-books state: editing the latest and planning the next, but with not a lot of real creation going on. What usually happens during this time is a lot of very odd dreams in the night. It's as though my imagination is still running but without an outlet. There was a passage from Stephen King's "Danse Macabre" (Berkely, 1983) in which the imagination is likened to a pit full of alligators. Sometimes you have to feed the gators to keep them from escaping. The analogy always conjures up the memory of a bit from the movie, "Romancing the Stone" in which the bad guy DID have a pit full of gators (or maybe it was crocodiles).

For me, writing is "feeding the gators" and when they ain't getting fed, the imagination machine dumps its product into my subconscious to create dreams of astounding clarity and seriously freaky imagery. There have been times when I wake from one of these subconscious creations and think, damn, that would be great in a book. A few have actually wound up in books, to wit, the dream sequence in "The Dreamer Gambit" and the cave dream in "Dabblers." While I don't generally read stories or watch movies about vampires, they tend to show up in my dreams on a regular basis, and I'll bet there's some deeply Freudian explanation for that. But since this has been going on as long as I can remember, I have not been troubled by the meaning of my dreams for a long time and don't invest much time worrying about whether they indicate I'm abnormal in some way. I know I'm not normal. I just need to keep the gators fed.

I have been doing some editing on "Stranger Faces," mainly in the realm of ensuring that I have conveyed what I intended, details are relayed in a timely manner, and no unintended contradictions have been introduced.

The length of this post seems to underscore my writing status just now--not doing it enough. Gonna  have to get down to really creating again, and soon.