Whew

Even with insomnia, this last week I got a story up off the ground from rough draft through two edits (thanks OWW people!) and off to the Shine Anthology before their deadline of July 31st.   I’m not sure it’s optimistic enough and who knows what they’ll think of the contents/theme, but I figure it’s the first near-future story I’ve written and I think it’s a fairly sweet tale, so maybe they’ll like it.  If not, oh well, on to somewhere else.

So far the story a week is happening.  I just started the next one, though I need to do more research before I get more than a few opening sentences down (I want the turn of the century Ukraine feel to come across properly).  I think I’m getting sick, however, so this story might happen more slowly.  Just as long as I get three more written before I go on vacation, I think I’ll be satisfied.  Then they can go up on OWW and collect some reviews while I’m gone.  Once I get back I can edit, submit, and then buckle down and get the damn novel finished.  It’s on like Donkey Kong after I return from Worldcon.  That damn novel is taking too long and my wonderful novel edit exchange partner has been doing a great job of sending me critiqued chapters.  I need to get the final third written so I can do the edits I so conveniently have piling up.

Then… tackling Casimir Hypogean.  It’s almost time.  Once these next three shorts are done I’ll have 12 stories in the submission cycle and hopefully the edited Chwedl as well making the agent rounds.  After that there’s no excuse not to finish the rewrite of my bane novel.  I have the suggestions I got at NorWesCon, I’m armed with the plot, and damn it if I’ll let this stupid project die without giving it a shot.  Besides, I really do want to write the sequels.  Kinda have to write the first one… you know, first.

All right. Drugs and then sleep. I will not be sick. I will not be sick.  I’ve got too much to do!

Insomnia and a Story a Week

Well, my mission to revive Short Story Monday is failing so far.  I seem to be sleeping only about every other day which is doing wonky things to my brain.  Between that and packing to move, my writing productivity has dropped far too much.  I got my third chapter out for the novel chapter exchange with my friend an entire week late, for one.  This has to end.

This morning when I couldn’t sleep I worked on a new short story and managed about 1000 words I don’t totally hate.  I think I need to let the rest percolate in my head for another day.  Hopefully tonight I’ll get some sleep and that will allow me the brain power to finish it.  The story is somewhat different from anything I’ve tried before, so no idea if it will work or not.  I think the beginning is super rough, but my beginnings are always the worst part.  Which is really unfortunate, since beginnings are the first thing people see when they’re reading.  I truly have to work on that.  It’s what editing is for, right? Right?

I realized though that this story might qualify in terms of theme and feel for the Shine anthology, which means I’d have to get it done and through draft form by the end of July.  It’s entirely possible, depending on how many drafts it is going to take.  I’m hoping not ten, I think I can reasonably do four drafts in the timeframe, depending on where my beta readers feel the story is at.  Of course, I haven’t written the end yet, so my normal predilictions for disaster or ambiguous endings might disqualify it from that anthology, but I’ll worry about that when I get there.  I can always try a happier ending version.

In other news I queried on Delilah again, since they’ve had it now for 4 months.  Still considering it, apparently.  This is a good thing, I think.  But damn I’m impatient.  It could be my first sale… meep.  I just want to know.  I hate wait. (Yeah yeah, wrong profession, move along now…)

I’m starting to mini-panic about World Con.  I don’t know what I’m going to do there.  Sure, go to panels and all that, but I’m going to be all on my own.  Will I have the courage to talk to strangers?  Will they even care what I have to say? So much easier to hide at home, but I’ve been dreaming about going to Montreal and to a World Con for years and now I can have both at once.  Even if I won’t be able to afford to eat while I’m there, heh.  I guess I’ll go and try to let things happen as they happen.  I’m sure it won’t be nearly as scary as I think it will be. Probably.

I haven’t been staying nearly far away enough from Clarion West blogs as I should. Whoops.  Slightly depressed now. I really wish I were there.  I’m ready, even if apparently my writing isn’t.  I figure I have about 30 weeks until I have to have something new ready for next year’s application.  Last year I took a real gamble with the story I chose because even though I love it, I’ve gotten very mixed response to it from “this is really cool, I couldn’t stop thinking about it (the gist of comments from a really well-known author!!!)” to “this doesn’t make much sense, why is everyone crazy and what’s going on?”… I guess I chose poorly.  Next year I’ll try to send something (or two somethings) that get a more universal okay.

WotF and Sadness

Well, I took the plunge and submitted a story to the Writer’s of the Future contest.  Wish me luck.  I have no idea if they’ll like it, but it’s on the longer side and good old science fiction, so maybe it’s to their taste.  It’s my first time. Meep.

In other news, I got yet another rejection in the flavor of “we liked X about this, but it’s not right for us/we can’t use it at this time, submit more”.  I feel so near the top, yet in the end it’s functionally the same as being at the bottom.  No sales. Grr. Argh.  Oh well, head down and sending that story out again.

I’ve been on a very strange sleeping every other day sort of schedule lately for no good reason, so writing has been really sporadic.  I think I might abandon writing cohesive whole chapters for the next couple weeks (we’re packing and moving) and work on editing and writing some more short stories.  I’ve been reading lots of award winning stories lately trying to pick out what makes them tick/win.  I think I’m going to try to get out of my comfort zone and write a few stories using elements I don’t tend to gravitate to, like specifically happy endings and linear, clear plots.  I don’t know. I have some ideas.

Meanwhile I’m trying to avoid reading Clarion West blogs because man, that’s depressing.  I’ve got over half a year to get some stories to the point that I’ll have a chance.  Of course, the story I submitted last year is still one of my all time favorites, so clearly I’m no kind of judge of my own work.  That story has since garnered a near-sale and a few nice comments on rejections, so it can’t be totally bad.  Once it gets back from the latest submission place I might post it in the JBU slush and let the grinder that are those commenters take a stab at it.  Or maybe it’ll get bought, finally.  We’ll see.  So yeah, NOT thinking about Clarion West 4 hours to the north for the next few weeks. Nope. Not at all.

Days Like These

Finally started a new short story, one of three I intend to write this month.  It’s going to be a bit of a challenge because I’m trying to keep it under 4k words and write about two star-crossed lovers on a dying Earth who happen to be teenaged boys.  It’s different, but I feel like writing a love story.  It will get me back in the mood to work on Chwedl, or something.

To write the beginning I ended up watching rocket take-offs on youtube.  For research. Really.

And people wonder why I choose to write science fiction and fantasy? Heh.

Now to find that awesome article in one of my Analogs’ about lunar bases and space stations.  And figure out how I want this story to end.

Getting Down to Business

I’m quitting my MFA program.  Though money was partially an issue, in the end it came down to me not enjoying the program and my classes not helping me as a writer.  I think that I’ll be more productive on my own for now.  I have the Online Writing Workshop for my critiquing fix.  So the plan is for me to work on the current novel projects this year and come next year apply to a couple of other MFA programs.  I’m thinking Stone Coast and Seton Hill, since they offer Popular Fiction tracks.

In the good news from all this, however, a girl in my workshop who writes pretty delightful regency romance has agreed to do chapter exchanges with me.  So I’ll be emailing her chapters of Chwedl and she’ll give me chapters of her current novel project.  Editing novels is tough partially because they’re so damn long that getting people to read all of it takes some doing.  It’s been my experience so far with the OWW that novel chapters don’t get as many critiques as short stories, plus there’s often no one to look for continuity errors or flow since people might only read a few chapters and not the whole book.  I’m thrilled that this girl and I will be exchanging chapters.  We’ll both get eyes on the whole of our novels.  Not to mention that I’ve read the first couple chapters of her novel and am totally hooked.  Hopefully she’ll feel the same about mine once she sees the first chapters (she’s pretty brave to want to exchange without seeing the novel first, but she has seen two short stories of mine, so I guess that’s something).

I aim to have Chwedl finished by the beginning of July with an edited version ready by the end of August.  At that point I plan to write up a query letter and start the fun and exciting agent hunting part of the writing life.  I have a short list of agents I want to query and it’s my hope that I’ll maybe get to meet and chat with a few at Worldcon, though I intend to keep that informal.  It would be nice to talk to some of the agents I’m considering, however, so I can get a feel for it this project is right for them.  And of course, I have to find a real title for the book since “Welsh word no one can pronounce” probably isn’t going to fly.

Hmm… “Aine and the Hounds”? Nah. “The Hounds of Clun Cadair”? Too Holmes-ripoff.  Grr. I’m not good with titles.  If only I could bribe Elizabeth Bear into thinking up titles for me, hers always rock.

Bits and Thoughts

I’ve been catching up on my issues of Analog and Weird Tales.  Often times I find Analog stories to be too technical for me to engage and Weird Tales stories too ‘horror’.  I prefer stories that focus on character first and everything else second (yes, I’ll even forgive a lack of coherent plot if the character issues drag me in enough).

However, I found two stories so far that are made of so much awesome I have to share how much I loved them.

The first is a short piece in Weird Tales Nov/Dec 2008 titled “How to Play with Dolls” by Matthew Cheney.  I assume looking at the length that this is flash fiction, which is a very hard length to do well in any genre.  Cheney pulls it off beautifully.  The story is engaging and haunting and full of just enough weirdness.  The images are perfect and there’s the right balance of telling and emotion.  He handles the underlying issues of the little girl in a way that isn’t overdone and the ending is strong, poignant even.  Find it, read it.  It’s flash at its best, in my opinion.

The story in Analog that caught my attention is in the June 2009 issue.  “Attack of the Grub-Eaters” by Richard A. Lovett has a somewhat unfortunate title in that I read the title and winced.  I had no idea what to expect.  Then I saw the format of the story, which is in forum posts and winced more.  When reading short stories, however, I always give a story at least two pages to keep me reading.  It took less than that for me to be hooked in this story.  By page three I actually stopped, went and got my husband, and started over reading it to him again (that was before I even got to some of the more awesome parts of the tale too).  The framing of this story is totally unconventional, but it works.  Hell, it better than works, I think it allows for the author to build tension and utilize dialogs in ways that a normal story structure wouldn’t.  In parts it’s laugh out loud funny, in others I was reading the way I’d read a particularly juicy flame-war; that edge of the metaphorical seat “oh god what’s going to happen next…” sort of car-crash-can’t-look-away sensation.  And thinking about it now, I guess “Home and Garden Saves Iowa” wouldn’t have been a great title either, though perhaps more apt.  Screw the title.  The story hardly needs it.  I’m going to give this copy of Analog to my dad I think, since his mole killing competitions with our neighbors are the stuff of (small town) legend.  Again, find the story and read it.  I can’t gush enough.

All right, setting gooey fangirlness aside now, back to writing related stuff.

I posted a story in the JBU slush.  I’ve lurked on that site a while, sometimes out of schadenfreude but mostly out of genuine curiosity about the way they do things since JBU is unconventional in many ways.  I’d never posted a story for consideration for two reasons.

One, JBU likes optimistic and often lighter work.  I don’t really write optimistic stuff.  My stories are often about people trying to deal with bad things that don’t necessarily have a rosy resolution or explanation.   After I wrote the story that became The Spacer’s Blade, I thought “hey, maybe this would work for them”.  I didn’t post the story immediately after I wrote it, however, for reasons that lead me to reason number 2 of why I’ve never posted there.

JBU slush has some of the most blunt and to the quick critiquers of anywhere I’ve ever seen.  In some ways it’s refreshing to not have to wade through a bunch of accolades that essentially mean nothing in terms of how to improve one’s writing.  In other ways, I don’t know why anyone would put themselves through that process without first getting the story as far as they could on their own.  Before this, I didn’t feel I had a story that was nearly up to snuff yet for that kind of criticism.  I didn’t want to waste my and other people’s time with typos, loose sentence work, and other easily fixed but sloppy writing mistakes.  (Caveat, this does by no means imply that I catch all that stuff in my various drafts.  Errors sneak right past me all the time.  I just try to make sure they have to roll a nat 20 to do it).

The story I posted is the fourth draft.  It’s been through the sff online writing workshop and critiqued by four pros at Norwescon.  And it still got mixed review at JBU.  I’ve rewritten the beginning paragraphs for the third time now based on what I’ve been told.  I’ve had two readers go over it and the third will get to it this weekend before I post the revision in the Slush.  So what is technically version 2 for the slush and version 5 for my records will, in fact, have gone through three revisions post the revision I did based on comments before the JBU sees it again.  I do this partly because I really want to be a professional writer, but also because once again, I don’t want to waste time with simple mistakes.  I want to know what the readers think of the STORY, not get bogged down in the sentence level stuff.

That said, I’m not taking all commented advice.  I can’t.  It’s one of the things I’ve learned about the dangers of workshopping.  Not everyone is going to like everything.  A writer has to parse what advice will improve the story and what might improve it but turn it away from the original vision in the writer’s head.  I know the story I’m trying to tell with The Spacer’s Blade.  If in the end I work out the things that people point out that I agree are keeping it from being that vision (because, hey, it’s not there yet- I’m pretty hard on myself as a writer too) and the barflies still don’t think it’s what they want, that’s ok.  Maybe it isn’t a fit for JBU.  I think it could be, but I’m going to try to walk the fine line between what people want to read and the kinds of stories I want to tell.

And in the end, no matter how much I want to be published, if I’m not writing the stories that I want to tell, well, I’ve failed even so.  I don’t think it’s an either/or.  With enough work and practice and some more work, I think I can find that balance, that happy zone where what I’m writing is transmitting to the reader exactly the kind of pleasure that I get when I read awesome things (see above gushing, for example).

Now, back to editing something else.

A Bit More About Process

I’m not a seat of the pants kind of writer, even when it comes to short stories.  Now, mind you, I don’t outline for short stories (though I might jot down notes or lines that come to me).  I definitely know where something is going when I sit down to write it.  I do change my mind and write something else to make things make more sense when I have to.  I imagine, however, that anyone watching my short story writing process would think I’m doing it on the fly.

This is because I write short stories in one or two sittings and hardly ever have notes (I usually do research as it comes up, thank you Google).

My short stories don’t start on the page.  They start in my head and sometimes have a very long gestation period.  Novels are the same way, though I tend to write up more notes when thinking about novels due to the sheer amount of stuff going on in my head when it comes to bigger projects.

First, there’s the spark.  Whatever set off my mind with a “hey, this could be a good story”.  From the spark I start to think about what it needs to fill it out, to bring it from cool character/idea/image/line of dialog etc… into being a full story/populated world.  From there I decide if the idea is going to need a novel length to fill it out (ignoring here, for the moment, that one of the most common coments I get on my short stories is “hey, this would make an awesome novel” sigh) or if I can turn it into something shorter.  Frankly, I prefer short stories because I like to just sit down and finish things.  Also, rewriting fifteen pages is far easier than rewriting 300.

But my point is that I spend a great deal of time thinking about everything before it ever sees the page.  I run through potential scenes, characters, what would or would not work in the particular world I’m inventing and why, and other useful questions like that.  I sometimes even start composing in my head and run through different POVs and tenses to feel where I want to start a story.

And then there are the times that I call my version of Writer’s Block.  I never run out of ideas, ever.  However, I occasionally get stalled out because my brain won’t stop with the thinking and focus on something long enough for me to just write something.  It’s why I haven’t been sleeping lately, and why I’ve done nothing but revise things for a few weeks now.  Too many bloody ideas.

So I’m going to have to force-march my brain for now, I think.  No starting or thinking about anything new before I’ve finished the following:

Sparks (fantasy short story), Prince Called Courage (fantasy novella), final edit of Monsters (fantasy short story), two thesis short stories (prewriting for my thesis novel), Chwedl draft (fantasy novel) and the rewrite of Casimir Hypogean (science fiction thriller novel).  The ambitious part of me says I can totally do this by September.  Suuure.

I’m going to do the short stories first, mainly becaues that means I’ll have eight or nine short stories out making the submission rounds while I hunker down to finish the novels.  I want to be done with this all by September since starting my thesis novel early wouldn’t be a bad idea.  Fortunately, ideas are imploding my brains but good when it comes to that novel, so at least it won’t be stalled due to lack of my head working on it.  Which is different from Casimir Hypogean, the bane of my existence.  I’m going to look at it as a learning experience and force myself to finish the rewrite.  If I never touch it again after that, so be it, but I’ve come too far to give up now.  It’ll take about 6-7 weeks of hard work to complete at this point.  I can do it.

Another Tiny Update

Rejection number 10 (form letter) came in yesterday.  Time to send that story out somewhere else.

On the “dancing, not quite from rooftops” level of awesome, I queried about another story that had been in the ether fora  couple months and found that they’re holding it for consideration/second opinions.  I’m going to interpret this is a win, even if they don’t take the story.  It means I’m getting past the first glance, which is a mark of improvement.  Go me.

I have an edit of that story also, so I responded thanking them for letting me know where I stood and offered up the edit if they’d like to see it.  I like both versions (one is cleaner since more eyes went over it) but who knows what they’ll want? Anyway, I’m psyched that I’m at least being considered.

Meanwhile, I’m working on the novella which will never sell.  Seriously, who buys fantasy novellas?  I’m going to try to keep it under 17k words so I can at least enter it in the ‘Writers of the Future’ contest.  I just finished Ken Rand’s (may he RIP) “Ten Percent Solution” and intend to put his ideas into practice to reduce the draft of the novella to as short as I can get it without hurting the story.

Then I need to type up Sparks and finish it.  I know where the story is going now, and the logistics of the fort.  All that I need to do is add some kick ass fighting and I’ll have story.  I really like the concept, but I’m not too sure I can write good fights.  I think I’ll enlist my husband to help me keep things realistic while still awesome.  There’s always a balance in fight scenes between cinematic kick-ass and “he did what with that sword?”

After Sparks and A Prince Called Courage are finished, I swear I’m going back to Chwedl.  I haven’t added a single new word to the novel in months (though I did do a bit of editing of the first 60k words).  Time to finish that baby so I can move on to finishing my Albetross (ie Casimir Hypogean).

All right.  Back to work on Novella that Won’t Sell.

Erractic, Why Yes!

For all that I update this erratically, I seem to be getting about 6 views a day.  Crazy!  I suppose I should write more here or something.

I was workshopped at Norwescon, which was immensely helpful.  I spent over 5 hours revising Blade Bearer (now called The Spacer’s Blade thanks to comments about making the name less generic) and sent it off to be… rejected.  Oh well.  It was a very nice rejection, asking that I send more things but ultimately the story wasn’t a fit for them.  Time to get more ink for the printer so I can send it out to somewhere else.

My rejection count is up high enough now that I’ve had to make a speadsheet instead of just relying on notepad.  I’m at 9 rejections, four stories out for submission, and one story ready to be sent out, and two stories in various stages of revisions that will hopefully be ready for their own rejections in a week or so.

491 rejections to go.

In Life, There is no Partial Credit

I *almost* sold a story.  Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t a nice balance between rejections with comments and form letters.

On the one hand, I’m glad to know what kept the mag from buying my story.  On the other hand, it’s tough to know that one small thing (ok, a central premise of the tale which I’m not sure will ever be to that reader’s taste…) kept my story from selling.

With a little help from my friends, however, I should be able to edit and clear that up at least a bit (already started on that part, so we’ll see).

But darnit. Almost. There.

Edit to add:  I wrote and asked if they’d look at a rewrite, and they will!  So there might be hope yet.  Go go go little story.

Meanwhile, back to edits on things and stuff.  And maybe some fricken writing.  I really want to be done with this novel draft already.

But first, back to ‘research’.  Also known as reading 17 Drizzt books.  Every one of those books made the NY best seller’s list, so I’m picking them apart to see what worked.  (Or you know, devouring the silly DnD heroics like candy, which is almost the same thing).

I think my stories need more kick-ass heroes.