Good Times
Two awesome things happened in my writing life in the last two days.
One: wrote a short story I’d been wanting to write for a while now. I managed to quiet down the excuse monkey and do it. Amazing how after working on a 60k word + novel for a while makes writing up 3 to 5k words seem like so much less work than it used to. I finished the entire first draft of the story in about 4 hours. It’s a retelling of the Samson and Delilah story. I’ve wanted to retell it ever since listening to Regina Spektor’s Samson song. The original story is so stupid that I wanted to write a version that makes more sense (and involved more of a fantasy/sorcery bent to things rather than just stupid people). It feels really good to get the story done. I think I might take a chance and submit it to S&S depending on how my rewrites of the two other stories I’m considering go in the next week. Though Samson drives some of the action, I feel that Delilah is truly the central part of it, so the strong central girl thing comes through well enough if subtly.
The second awesome is that I found out about grad school. I’m in! So now I have to figure out how to pay for it and what I’m going to do about that whole “sorta misrepresented the stuff I write” problem. Though, to be fair, my two stories I sent in weren’t exactly mainstream normal either. One is about a teenager heroin addict who kills her abusive ex (and has his ghost in the story) and the other is about a violin player from Hometown, Everywhere going to the Big City and finding herself (and falling for another girl). (And the final installment of that story, which I didn’t send them because I haven’t finished it yet reveals that the girl she’s in love with is actually a hermaphrodite with the bits of both sexes. And I’m probably going to rewrite the whole thing and put a more high fantasy bent on it since as one reader pointed out it has that feel anyway).
I’m now brainstorming and taking all ideas for how to raise money for school. So far on the maybe possible list (instead of the silly list) I’ve got bake sales and chapbook donation/sales. It wouldn’t be that expensive to print up a little (maybe 40 page) chapbook of my poetry. I’m not sure how many people I could convince to donate/buy them. Anyone know how bake sales work? Any other ideas? I’m not expecting to raise all 25k, but it would be nice if I could get some monies to put towards books and such. The more costs I can defray on the front end, the better it will be in the long run since I’m pretty much doomed to some sort of Federal loan. (So much for having no debt. At least interest rates are low right now).
This does not affect the Ten in Ten plan, by the way. I’m going to work my thesis into my novel plans and hopefully write a novel for it which will be that year’s novel. Probably War Witches, but maybe the sequel to Dangerous depending if I get lucky and the whole sale thing happens. I guess I’ll have to cross that whole “doesn’t like to write lit fic” bridge when I come to it, eh? MFA programs do have a reputation for turning out writers who sound just like each other (and their profs), but I have my own fairly distinctive voice and thus this isn’t a huge concern. I’m stubborn.
Well, now to wait for the paperwork machine that is the University proper to get around to processing that I’m admitted to the program and do the whole actual admission process so I can find out about aid.
Back to writing. Yay.
