I just plowed through 3100 words on the possible self-pub experiment.

I feel…great. I’ll need to tweak some things later on, but once I got going, the words came easily, and the scene will act as a springboard for later events.

The story is, as of now, untitled. Its working title has been The Evil That Men Do (named for the Shakespeare line and the Iron Maiden song), although at the moment I’ve been calling it Purgatory. I wrote it in 2006 for NaNoWriMo, and I’ve come back to it over the years, cleaning it up as I can and picking at it as necessary.

I still like the story, the characters, the narrator. When I first started contemplating testing out self-pubbing, Purgatory/Evil came to mind immediately. It’s already a tough sell — a weird mashup of urban fantasy and post-apocalyptic hijinks, with zombies to taste — and the market is getting tougher. This is not a story I’m sure I could ever sell to an agent or publisher. So I pulled it out and looked it over and chopped off the entire second half.

Oh, and somewhere in between all that, I started on a short story set several years later, just to see what the narrator was up to. One thing led to another, and I suddenly had a more fleshed-out universe — and some ideas as to where to go with character development in Evil.

And here I am. It’s 1:30, I planned to be in bed hours ago, but I think I’ve set the stage to give the back end an appropriate rewrite. Which makes me happy.

Along with figuring out how to market myself as a freelance writer/editor, I’ve also got to consider marketing this thing. How do you drum up an audience? I could post snippets, I guess. Maybe a short story or two (if I can figure out how to write one — all of mine turn out long).

But I’ll figure that out tomorrow. Another fun day of editing ahead.