To all the Veterans out there

Thank you for your service, thank you for being the one to offer Uncle Sam that blank check. I know what it takes, 6 years I offered that check and thankfully never had it cashed in full. So thank you again, and I hope your commands gave you liberty early today. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTs6a0ORdQU&w=560&h=315]

NaNo update

So I'm changing my goal a bit for NaNo, just to write 50K words this month between the number of stories I work on. Reality kind of reminded me that I don't in fact have all day every day to write. Ah well :) Current NaNo word count stands at 13,988. Anyways, the current project is my Winter Contest story for Lit, with a working title of "Greedy Christmas". Savannah's a workaholic, VP of her firm with visions of someday taking the top seat. She's weary of the holidays and the constant barraging for good will towards others. One drunken night she gets a visitor...

So begins NaNo

This weekend starts NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month. This month is fairly busy for me, particularly since the Literotica Winter Contest will kick off on the 10th, but I'll give a fair crack at it. I urge anyone who has the inclination to start writing to give this a shot, it's free to join in and there are plenty of friendly folks to give out advice and cheer you on. You can find more information here: NaNoWriMo . Feel free to join some of the Lit authors participating in the Literotica Hangout in the Erotica forums and follow along with my progress under the name JC Winchester. Happy writing!

Dirty Dozen Wilderness Challenge

For those of you that have been reading my stories for a while, you may have guessed one of my favorite hobbies, besides writing, is hiking. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act which created the Wilderness Preservation System and initially set aside over 9.1 million acres as Wilderness and not subject to human intervention. In celebration of this Act the Southeast office of the Wilderness Society is hosting a hiking challenge. The challenge runs from September 2014 to September 2015 and is to hike 10+ miles per area in 12 wilderness areas. For signing up they will send you a sticker, complete the challenge and they'll send you a patch and you'll be eligible for other prizes like hiking the most miles, the most states, best photos, and best descriptions. For more information, follow this link: http://www.southeastwilderness50.org/dirty-dozen/ Happy Hiking!

Busy

Just wanted to post up that the reason there hasn't been any new work posted for the last few weeks is that I've been swamped with a project at work. Hopefully the end of the project will come in the next week or two and give me some time to get back into writing, but for now I just wanted to let everyone know that I haven't given up writing or left, just been very busy. 

Story Length

Something I always wondered about was how long stories had to be for various classifications. Ran across an article that discussed story length and included the following numbers from the Science Fiction Writers of America:

Short Story - Up to 7,500 words

Novelette:7,500 to 17,500 words

Novella: 17,500 to 40,000 words

Novel: 40,000 words +

Determining page count for an e-book seems to vary all over the place, but the most common numbers appear to be 250 or 300 words for each page. For ease of calculation, when I estimate the length of an e-book, I will use 250 words per page as that seems to be fairly accurate.  

Clarification on the Smashwords book

Before anyone asks why A Weekend in Appalachia is available on both Literotica and Smashwords, it was used to give me a chance to explore self publishing. Once the Literotica 2014 Survivor contest ends I expect my output will drop as I'll be continuing to try to focus more on improving my writing skills [and allowing more time to edit stories]. If you enjoyed A Weekend in Appalachia on Lit I highly encourage you to check it out in it's Smashwords format [it's free there] as I took some of the feedback from the readers of Lit and rewrote the ending. 

Ebook Copyrights and DMCA

Today Manu, one of the site owners of Literotica, posted in the Authors Hangout instructions on how to file a DMCA copyright infringement with Amazon. Amazon keeps track of the number of DMCA filings against authors and publishers and if enough are collected, they will ban that person. Here is a link to the very detailed instructions on how to follow through with the DMCA: http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1055555

Introduction

Hello there! 

I'm the author behind the pen names J.C. Winchester and JagFarlane.

For those not familiar with the name JagFarlane, it is the name I use on the website Literotica where most of my work currently resides. It is a free adult stories website and if you enjoy erotic stories I highly recommend you try it out. There are thousands of authors on the site ranging from those just beginning to seasoned, published veterans. 

The name J.C. Winchester is used for anything I publish outside of Lit. Currently that means publishing through SmashWords.

I plan to use this blog to update where I am currently at with stories and when stories are published.