The Many Ramblings of K. A. Webb

February is going to be the first month this year where I focus on posting bonus material, because working on the World Walkers collection last year has made me realise exactly how much there is still to work on. I have fourteen different collections (which may go down to thirteen with what I now know about the ‘Astral’ World) and every one of them seems to keep growing. With every story I write, with every piece of bonus material, I learn something new about my collections, something new about the worlds I write about, and it feels like it’s a job that will never end. It’s something that is both wonderful and terrifying at the same time, because I want to write for the rest of my life so knowing how large the job I’ve set myself is makes me happy but at the same time it can feel like I’ll never get eveything done.

Even with all the work I did on the World Walkers there’s still much more to do. I have the worlds, but I have very little else, so I know that the next thing on the list is naming continents, cities, towns, rivers, and who knows what else. This isn’t something I only have to do for the World Walkers collection either. Every single one of the collections needs more fleshing out, because even though I thought of all these things before I started I didn’t do as much work as I probably should have done, but then I made my decision based on the feeling that I either needed to do something with my writing or find something else. At that point I knew I wanted people to read what I was writing, although I never honestly thought I was a good enough writer to have people actually want to read my fiction. So I jumped in at the deep end with some basic ideas and started going. There are things I wrote based on ideas that changed very quickly as I started exploring my worlds.

The Donor House was, when I started writing, going to have been open for decades when Morgan entered, but then things changed when I wrote the ‘Beginning of the House’. Everything I’ve done has ended up being an exploration of worlds I began with maybe one idea that probably came to me in a dream. One of the early ideas I had, because I wanted to be able to combine all the ideas I had at the time, was of someone who got trapped in their dreams and travelled through a number of different places within their dreams. There’s every possibility I might even start that at some point. I still have other stories that I want to start and post, but I know I need to focus on what I’m doing right now.

One of the advantages I’ve found with writing in so many different collections is how easy it can be to work on them. I don’t have a problem with writer’s block now, because I can leave one collection behind to work on another one if I’m having trouble, and then I often find it easy to go back to what I was doing before.

I enjoy writing the bonus material. I enjoy exploring the worlds I’ve created. Something I have been thinking about is writing a travel guide to each of my collections, because I think it would be interesting, but I need to know more about the worlds first. There are some that are simpler than others, like the world of the Donor House, but the entire world was changed when people realised there were vampires and I need to work out exactly how that happened.

I do have some lists of bonus material I want to write and other people want me to write, but I’m open to ideas at all times. Have a question about why or how something happened? Prompt me. Want me to write about a specific world, or setting, or learn more about the races of any world? Let me know. I try to write what people want to see when I can, so ask away.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

This is my most intricate collection, and the one that I still have a lot more work to do on, because of the number of worlds, the number of races, and the characters that keep popping into my head. There are stories I need to write and post; more bonus material than I will be able to complete in a month (as I now realise); and magics I need to understand. At the moment I am working with a limited number of worlds and there is still so much more work to do on them, let alone moving onto other worlds, and the strange thing is that I love it. Not always knowing where things are going is kind of fun, although it can also be irritating when things don’t seem to work together (the wonders of working with characters who lie and scheme and hide little pieces of themselves). Of course I’m almost certain, after writing stories for several worlds, that there are different layers to each of them… which probably doesn’t make sense.

The magic used to create the web was new and most of what the fae did was experimentation, with no idea what was going to happen. Choices were made quickly due to fear. Now there are a collection of magical worlds that never existed before and each one, to me, seems a little like an onion. We talk of parallel universes where there may be another one of us who has made different decisions and lives an entirely different life. Now, I don’t think that every decision affects the magic, but there are those that do, and their parallel universes are parts of the same world, leading to layers of world, making them rather like an onion.

History is a big interest of mine. I read a lot about the Plantagenets and the Tudors, and I’ve never been able to stop myself thinking about what would have happened if… and there are more ifs that I can contemplate. When I create my own histories there are ifs. What if some of the fae, the Gold family, stayed on the fae’s old world? Would they have changed things if they had gone back in time? What if Raenarin’s Witch Queen had never been assassinated? How would that have changed the world? I want to write some of them, some of the layers of world, because I care about the ifs.

The problem is knowing that there are so many more posts I want to write about this collection. When I look at the my other collections there are posts I want to write about them too, and it feels like there isn’t enough time to write the posts, write the stories, and do everything I want to do. It’s possible I may end up having to work instead of being able to focus on my writing, but if I don’t have enough time now then… I don’t know what will end up happening. Having my website is wonderful. I’ve earned a little money this week. Things seem to be getting better. I just need to know that I can make money through this, even if it is just enough to buy food every week, because I don’t want to have to cut down the work I do.

Posting almost every day has made me happy. Having a focus has worked wonders, although my brain is still plot bunnying. Now I just need to work out how I can keep doing this and make money, so ideas would be great. Writing is what I want to be doing, so ghostwriting may work for me, and there are a couple of things I want to try out, but nothing is definite right now. Is there anything I can do here that people would pay money for? Ebooks are something I’m going to work on and I plan on doing bundles (mobi, epub and PDF together), but that will take time, so I need something faster. Yes, I realise I’ve been posting rather a lot about money recently, but having to move out, when we weren’t ready, has changed things and I need to earn. As soon as I possibly can.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

Sometimes you write a story and you know damn well that the characters have been lied to, that certain things have happened for reasons they don’t know because someone explained situations to them in a way that means they have an incorrect idea of why they are in said situation, but because you’re writing about that character it’s not possible to show that they have believed lies. They don’t know that the reasons they were given were lies. Occasionally these lies can make a story seem more illogical than they are and because the characters are unlikely to ever know about the lies they were told it seems a little difficult to make the story seem less illogical. I could write about other characters who had to deal with the same thing and weren’t as lucky. I could write about one of the characters who told the lies in the first place. I’m just not sure if they’re stories I want to take on, but at the same time I want to make the original story less illogical.

Then there are character types that seem to be taking over some of my stories – the creepy stalker type. I can’t explain exactly why, but I have always written about them and I don’t think I’m going to stop, although I know that I want to teach them all the error of their ways. Some will change, realise they made mistakes, and make their lives different to the way they may have been if they didn’t have someone there to point out all their flaws. Others will get their comeuppance, but it will take time.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.