Finally finished my aforementioned short story, which wound up being 21,000 words. I submitted it to my publisher this morning. When I mentioned it was technically YA and counted towards "romance" instead of "erotica" she asked if I would prefer to publish it under their Young Adult branch instead. My publishing date would be pushed back two months because they only release one title per week, and she warned me that unless my career is writing YA fiction, it's hard to promote and/or sell YA short stories. I opted for a May release as a regular romance story.

From this, I have learned that you really, REALLY need to know your market before you try to enter it. You can't just say, "I'm going to write everything so everyone will have a chance to read it!" You have to know what each of the genres want and how best to adapt to each of them. Good to know for the future, especially since I have a dozen manuscripts for children's books I want to publish someday. I'll do it under a different pseudonym, of course, because enough people were in a kerfuffle that Rowling wrote a detective novel (even though she tried to keep it a secret) that I can't imagine how people would react if they knew a romance novelist also penned their children's favourite bedtime stories. I'll also probably do the illustrations for them, and I don't know if I'll use a separate pseudonym for my artwork as well. It might become hard to keep track of all of me.

Now I have to focus on my Transexual romance/erotica novella that is being released in June and finish writing my Bisexual romance/erotica novella so I can maybe release it in autumn. Since I have the G, B, and T in 'LGBT' covered, I'm thinking of maybe adapting a short story I wrote for a creative writing course into a Lesbian romance-ishy thing. Then perhaps to completely round my portfolio out I'll write some Queer and/or Asexual short stories as well. Oh, and I'll continue to hone my screenwriting skills.

What I'm saying is I've got a lot of work to do.

So it goes.