Annie Bellet

So between real life fun like car accidents, new car shopping, and illness (mmm colds are so much fun, really), I’ve gotten just about nothing done writing-wise.  I think I’m going to just write November off as a lost month, though I suppose two short stories isn’t the worst outcome.  I’m working on another one, but the science part of it is tripping me up.  I’m not a hard sci/fi writer, but this story really wants to be a hard sci/fi story.  I solved one problem, theoretically, now I have to figure out how to solve one other sciencey issue and then maybe I can write the damn story.

I’m looking ahead at workshops and WoTF submissions.  I have a novella planned that is supposed to be my first quarter submission, but if I don’t get it written in the next couple weeks, I’ll have to do something else, since I need a week or two break between writing and editing things.

The bad news is that with the car stuff, I might not be applying to any of the big three workshops this year.  We had to clean out our funds to replace the car about a year sooner than we were planning to (it was a very old car, so we were going to replace it, but not for a year when our savings had been built up for it).  So the money that was getting put away for the workshops has been used on a car.  That’s life though, sometimes it doesn’t go according to plan.

I might sign up for one of Dean Wesley Smith’s weekend workshops instead.  They’d be easy enough to get to and I’ve heard good things about them.  Mostly I’m looking around for ways to really take my writing to the next level.  I’m getting plenty of “positive” rejections, which tells me that while my writing is good, something might be missing.  I want to figure out how to push past the “good but no thanks” stage and get to the “here’s your check” stage.  I know it’s not a perfect science and that even famous writers get rejections, but I want to get at least my first sale someday.  I need a little push, I think.  Something.

For now I’ve been reading books on fiction editing and selling a novel.  Gearing up to revise my novel and get my submission package ready to go to my chosen agents.  I’ve got a top 5 list put together, so hopefully by January I’ll be ready to go on that.  First though comes the hard part, the actual revising of something that is many thousands of words long.  I’ll just tackle it the same way I wrote it; one page at a time.  One page at a time.