Breaking Radio Silence

So I've been a little incommunicado this week, primarily because of Powering Through the Pain, as I kept my nose to the grindstone to distract from migraine city, before seeing the dentist on Wednesday finally.  So hooray, that hurdle's jumped, my teeth look great, and oh yeah...

I totally finished Dust to Dust last night.

Clocking in at 75,000 words, the tale of a dysfunctional family of nine with myriad magical abilities and a curse that has them all hell-bent on killing each other, this might actually be my most polished first draft yet.  I did a cursory read through, and while I'm gonna let it sit for a bit before edits, I really don't think this one will take much.  It's quite astonishing.  It came out looking on paper mostly like it did in my head.  I even think my super dooper plot twist works.

Huh.  I'm pleased as punch.  Go figure.

Anywho, taking a little breather before editing that and I think I'm going to push back starting Hypothetical of Being til mid April or so, at least until after I get going with Anonymous, being a few chapters into posting that.  In the meanwhile, as you all know, I've been thinking a lot about the whole subject of self-publishing in conjunction with traditional publishing.  Using a project that wouldn't work well in the traditional publishing arena to build a quicker fanbase and backlist, rather than expecting to get rich quick off it.  Although that would be nice.  

So to that end, I was looking at one of my sci-fi novels, Gemini, and pulled out a file from yeeeeeeeears ago.  It's a series of trunk novels I never told anyone about, because I wasn't sure what if anything I was going to do with any of it, called Year of the Zodiac, a YA sci-fi series.  I ultimately broke Gemini off into its own book, seeing it as the only viable storyline, not because the series was bad, but because I couldn't really picture it ever getting picked up by a traditional publisher.  They were a lot of fun to write, it was back before I was writing to try and impress anyone so they were just balls to the walls action, adventure, end of the world chaos one breakneck chapter after the next, everything I personally wanted to read.  But by the time I stopped writing them, I was convinced I knew enough about publishing to know they'd never go anywhere, at least not without years of success under my belt to parlay into the right deal, so I took the Gemini book and tweaked it to be a far future sci fi standalone and put the rest away.  So basically right now I'm just looking through the series again, playing around with it, seeing if its tweakable, editable and ultimately self-publishable - I honestly don't know.  Not even close to deciding.  Its just fun to read them again.  I honestly haven't even thought about them in a couple years.  I might be sending the first one - Ignition - out to a couple people in the next few days or week or so to get some opinions.  And I did always greatly dislike the idea of having it all just sit there.  So we'll see.

In other news, I was reading QueryTracker's latest success stories, and saw this one:

http://querytracker.net/jane_kindred.php

And I was like, holy crapola, I need to read that like now.  So how about you guys?  Anyone else heard of any upcoming stories or deals lately that they're just salivating for?