Miscellaneous thoughts

I just had my driver's license renewed last week.  It arrived in the mail today.  It's kind of unbelievable.  It took less than a week for the government to manufacture my license and mail it to me.  I was expecting it to take a month at least.

Meanwhile, PublishDrive told me they want my tax and payment info.  I've apparently reached some sort of threshold for that.  I entered it, but I'm not sure I did it right.  I'll look at at again later tonight.

I've got over 10k words written in book 4 of Wheel of Fire.  I took a couple days off from it to jot down some ideas I had for a short story.  I returned to the book last night, though.  I let myself get a little carried away, too, with a monologue by a new character.  I mean "carried away" in a positive way.  I could sense myself getting a little emotional while writing it, and that's a good sign.  I'm keeping the monologue.  In fact, I'll probably expand on it during revision.

Members of Bookbub continue to recommend Clouds of Venus, and that warms my heart.  Thanks, folks.  :)

I've been thinking a little about the horror genre lately.  I don't have any plans to write horror stories, but I still find the genre fascinating.  The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that horror stories are, first and foremost, morality tales.  There needs to be a main character that survives the killings and whatnot, and that MC needs to learn some moral lesson or other.  Traditionally, those moral lessons are imparted by the other victims.  The bullying jock, for example, ends up dead because bullying is bad.  The slutty girl ends up dead because promiscuity is bad.  And so forth and so on.  There are all sorts of different morals the writer can present, and they don't have to have anything to do with traditional morality.  I think some sort of moral needs to be present, though.  The MC has to learn something from the deaths of his/her friends.  In modern times, we've seen horror movies where everyone dies, and what's the point in that?  No one survives to learn anything and become a better person.  The story becomes pointless.  It's just death and torture for the sake of death and torture.  So if ever venture into horror, I intend to go the traditional "morality tale" route, because a story should actually be a story rather than just a vignette.

That's all for now.  Take care, folks.  :)