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Archive for the ‘Short Story Monday’ Category

Sometimes it Pours

Woke up at 4am because of the cat.  Stayed awake because I’d been having an awesome dream about being a stowaway on an alien ship that then got attacked by pirates and knew it could be a super cool short story.  Normally when I have a story idea it has to brew for a week or a month or a year.  Apparently all this one wanted was about 4 hours.

Well, it’s a story anyway.  After 7.5 hours of nearly continuous writing, the monstrosity that is “Crawlies” is now complete.  After a “oh god how messy is this” editing pass it stands at 7715 words.  Bleh.  I was aiming for 4000.  Is this what plot does?  Cause baby, this story has plot.  Hell, it’s got everyting. Provided that everything means aliens, pirates, an 11 year old protagonist, bombs, and exploding head jokes.  My research firefox window currently has open windows from wikipedia for oxygen toxicity, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and squid.  Lord save me, there’s even slang.  It was like this character waltzed into my head and wouldn’t shut the hell up.  Of course, she’s 11, she doesn’t shut the hell out anyway.  I wish writing was always this easy.  Even if it doesn’t let me do anything else.

Now that my work day is gone, I’m going to go eat something (sorta forgot to do that in the ‘writer will finish or she gets the hose again’ fog I’ve been in most of today).

In the other kinda of ego-boosting news (no, not the yet again “close but try again” rejection I got today), one of my poetry chapbooks sold at the bookstore COLD.  As in a random stranger who is no relation to me chose my little self-published being sold on commission chapbook all by himself with no arm twisting from my mother and paid COLD DELICIOUS CASH for it.  I feel pretty good about that.  Poetry is hard to sell, and this means that mine was good enough to attract a random human’s interest.  Or you know, so bad he couldn’t resist buying it to chortle at the next wine and schadenfreude party.  I’m going to believe the former.  For my peanut-sized ego’s sake.

Ok, now, to post this monstrous new baby of mine somewhere for critique.  Oh why oh why is it so long?  Curse you baby.

But I love you.  In fact, today (and probably only today), I love writing.  Thank you writing gods.  Now, can I please have a nice compelling dream about how to finish this novel? K thanx.

Oh yeah, and if you think I was kidding about my mother arm twisting people, you should talk to Ken Scholes*.  I’m surprised he made it out of there without a chapbook.  Lucky bastard.  You know you’ve hit a sad sad hole in your social life when your mother has to do your networking for you.  Thanks mom.  28 is just like 8, somedays.  At least she didn’t try to arrange a play date or anything.

(*Ken Scholes is, in fact, as far as my limited mother-twisted arm contact with him has gone, a supremely tolerant and nice guy. Buy his books).

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.

Premier of Short Story Monday!

Short Story Monday Begins!  I’ll try, for the sake of organization, to keep these Monday posts at least similar in appearance.

Story Title:  Space Bones

Word Count: 4158

Plot Summary: While being escorted to her Court Martial, a Captain and her escort encounter something wondrous in hyperspace.

Time to write first draft: About 4.5 hours.

Other Comments:  This story is actually in two parts because I got to what felt like one ending and wanted to continue from there just to see how it worked.  So the first part is 3332 words and the second is 826 or there abouts.  When I sat down to write in the wee hours, I had nothing but the title.  I liked the title, however.  I started and got about a paragraph into one story and realized it wasn’t the Space Bones story.  So I cut and saved it to a note file for later and started over again.   After working so much on my novel, which is third person omniscient, I really wanted to write something in first person.   I find first person much easier to sustain than third, so it’s sort of like taking a big old brain break.

I used The Rough Guide to the Universe by John Scalzi to generate some places and names and ran with it from there.  The story is a rough sketch, sort of like the bones referenced.  I like that about it.  We’ll see what my unfortunate readers think.  Because, oh yes, I’ve created a nice little list and I’m going to mail these Monday stories to my dear friends.  Don’t pity them too much. They can opt out, I won’t hate them for more than a year or six. Truly.

Now, back to breaking my brains on Casimir Hypogean.

24 Hours Sleepless and Counting

Insanity tastes like…  Everything said here might be a giant lie someday.   We’ll see.

I’ve been thinking about practice.  I read a quote by someone (or someone quoted it to me? I can’t quite recall) that referred to art, but I’m going to appropriate the meaning for writing.  Basically the gist was that if you want to be good at drawing, draw something 1000 times and you’ll excel.  I think the idea has merit, which is good because it is essentially the idea behind the Ten Novels in Ten Years project of mine.  If I do it ten times (and really, with all the rewrites, drafts etc… it will be triple that at least), I might get halfway decent at this whole writing thing.

So I’m going to extrapolate this concept out even further.  I’ve decided that since I now have the time, and certainly the ideas, I want to write one short story a week.  I accept they won’t be good.  That’s fine.  Some will likely be variations on a theme in nature.  Who cares?  I can sort through later and revise the ones I like, steal from the ones that have promise, and murder the ones that should never see Others‘ eyes.  So from now on, Monday is Short Story Day.  Each Monday for at least the next year, I plan to write a short story.  My only rule for myself is that it has to be at least 2000 words (about 6-7 pages double spaced depending on dialogue etc…).

So begins Doom, part 2.

Now, I go sleep. Maybe.

Novel is creeping along.  I think aiming for ten solid pages a week is good enough. Yeah.