Cleanup Week
Novel editing is done. Novel bits are mailed and emailed off to appropriate places for the workshop. Now to get the rest of the stuff done this week that should get done.
I have two stories I need to mail off. I’m discouraged in that I’m fairly sure I’ve sent them to the most ideal markets for each, which means now I start sort of shooting in the dark. One of the stories is pretty much hard sci/fi, in that there is nothing in it which isn’t utterly possible in the near future. But it’s a love story, not a traditional hard sci/fi story. So I’m not sure if the harder sci/fi markets are right for it. Never know til I try I guess, right?
The other story is sort of fable/fairytale-esque and has gotten some really nice rejections, but now I’m low on markets for it. It has eight rejections, which isn’t enough for me to trunk it, but the next two most likely markets for it have other things subbed to them already. So I think maybe I’ll sit on this one, much as I hate to, and wait for one of those markets to open back up again. Or I could send it off to a major long-shot. Hmm.
I have four short stories and a novella to finish, hopefully this week. Then, next week, I start “Sindra’s Storm”. For real. Outline or no outline. Who knows? Maybe one will miraculously come to me this weekend to be written down hurriedly on hotel stationery. If not, well, I have enough to get started. I know the general plot and have the shape of the first few chapters. I even have villain motivation and all that good stuff. It might be that I just have to sit back and let the book write itself, so to speak. Not something my control freak brains are good at doing. Normally I have to be inside everything, figuring out what is going on and what is going to happen next, and I prefer to work from an outline that tells me where the story is going (even if I generally end up revising this outline four or five times while writing). This time, maybe not. I’ll know in a week.
I’m setting a totally arbitrary deadline for finishing the rough draft of this novel as March 26th. Eight weeks. 110,000 words. About 2,000 words a day. This’ll be fun!