First blog post ... ever

     And of course it's days after I "started" this blog.  Sort of the way I am really:  not all that good at follow-through.  Anyway, here it is.  Better late than never, I suppose.

     Vampires are dead, in more ways than one.  They're certainly dead if you're trying to break into the genre.  Stories about the undead have always been fairly popular, though there are, like anything else, ups and downs.  You think they're pretty much over, and then something like Twilight comes along.  Suddenly, vampires are everywhere, and that's not necessarily good for everyone.
     I'll be honest:  I read the Twilight books too.  I've watched all the movies.  I liked them for a while, until I really started thinking about them, but that's another post (that I probably won't write; it's too long and involving).  The problem I've always had with them is that the main vampire characters are just so nice.  Something dark and scary, a girl's ultimate bad-boy fantasy, has been turned into a harmless guy who'll pick you up when you slip on the ice.  My favorite characters in the movies were always the bad guys.  Give me James or Riley any day; forget Edward.
     So, of course, wanting to correct this (at least a little), I wrote my own vampire story.  Not that he's a blood-thirsty killer or anything, but at least he drinks blood and isn't ashamed of it.  I thought I had it done, got one request for the full manuscript, and then a reject saying the middle needed work.  Okay, fix the middle.  Send it back, rejected.  Vampires are over.  Well, not really over, there are just wwaaaaayyyy too many of them. 
     A good part of a hopeful writer's time will inevitably be spent researching agents.  So I did, for hours and hours, day after day.  I went to blogs, I went to forums, I read interviews.  A frequently asked question was something along the lines of:  "What are you seeing too much of?", or "What don't you want to see anymore of?"  Answer:  Please stop sending me vampire stories.  After seeing that numerous times, I started to panic slightly.  I've got this book, I think it's good, there's probably nowhere in the market for it.  Oh goodie.
     Which brings me to Kindle, and also this blog.  I'd been thinking about it for a little while, now I'm going to take the plunge.  I've started changing my submission format into publishing format.  I will probably end up begging (or paying) someone else to change publishing format into Kindle format.  Just not confident enough in my skills to not completely screw it up.  And so, blogging.  Marketing strategy, ya know.  I have no clue what to blog about, and have therefore called this Random Musings in an effort to not limit myself.  If I did, I would most likely not be posting at all.
     So, first post is in.  I'm sure it's dry and boring.  Hopefully I'll get the hang of this and they'll start getting better.  Found this on my facebook page last week.  Pretty interesting.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/cityofglass/what-are-the-odds-that-exist-as-you-today-4eor
     I wonder what the odds are that anyone has read this.