To Trunk or Not To Trunk

There’s this thing that writers do, and the word for it is a bit old-timey. Way back when, where did you store your stuff that you put away for later? In a trunk, of course. What do writers do with works that need to be put away for a while (or longer)? We trunk them.

I’ve never felt a need to trunk a work. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’ve held onto my old works with a clawed fervor that would surprise… no one.

Like in some other aspects of my life, I’ve made some recent decisions that surprise me. I’ve decided to use my trunk for the first time. In it, I’m placing, with the utmost care, the following works:

  • The Remembrance (Dragon City, book 1)
  • The Glass Crown (Dragon City, book 2)
  • The Purple Heart (Dragon City, book 3)
  • Steven (both comic and prose)
  • Fight or Flight (http://davidmcrampton.com/fofcomic)

There’s nothing about trunking a work that prevents me from pulling it out and working on it in the future. To be fair, though, my understanding is that this is rare. Most commonly, stories in the trunk are mined for ideas and tweaks for newer works.

What will I focus on now? I’ve been participating in the Prompted Word, and that will likely continue. It’s been stoking my fictiony fires, and I’ve found a new world that intrigues me. I’ll be getting someone to do the cover for Too Dimensional, an urban fantasy novella that introduces us to the Adam’s Name universe. Then comes epub and mobi generation and tweaking, the release, and then posting bits of it in various and sundry digital hangouts. After that? I have the next Adam’s Name story, set in Chicago, as well as a paranormal romance idea that is teasing the hell out of me.

I should go to Chicago. For research, not for pizza and hot dogs. Okay, ALSO for pizza and hot dogs. But mostly for research.