Random Thoughts #209

3

That thing I said last week about starting long stuff? I guess I meant medium stuff.  I finished a novella, which will be my WotF Q3 entry.  It kept trying to become a novel.  I won though, the story stayed under 17,000 words.   Now, to actually finish a novel. Seriously.  As soon as I finish just one last short story. (I’m like an addict, one more hit, just one more, ooh, wait, okay, one more).

First up on the plate is my middle grade novel.  I’m practicing not doing any research.  I realize this is a strange thing for a writer to practice, but I think sometimes I clog my brain with needing to find “true” details to stick in and don’t let the imagination run where it might.  The story is a fantasy with entirely made up everything, so it seemed like a good time to just, well, make shit up.  I’ve always believed that internal consistency matters a hell of a lot more for storytelling (especially in any story with magic or a made-up world) than having things be “realistic”.  I decided to make this novel my practice for making shit up after I was brainstorming about it and realized the princess in my head had bright pink hair.  My first thought after that was “oh, she can’t have pink hair, that’s totally unrealistic.”  Yeah, this is doubly funny if you know me, since I rarely have ‘hair’ colored hair (it’s blue and purple at the moment).  That was when it clicked that maybe my critical side was interfering in the fun of writing.  So I’m rolling with my imagination, whatever it wants, it gets this time around.  Pink hair it is!

I’m attending two more workshops this year, and hopefully Orycon as well (I’m thinking of seeing if I can’t get on a panel or two).

4 more rejections until I throw a 100 rejection party.  The more stuff goes out, the faster the responses stack up.  I figure once I hit 100 I’m going to go back to not keeping track anymore until I think I might be getting close to 200, when I plan to throw another party (100,200,500, 1000, 10000 etc).

Oh, and in cool news, an artist friend of mine is doing up a graphic novel version of one of my favorite stories (story hasn’t sold yet, sigh, but I’m hopeful).  Even if I never sell the story, I originally envisioned it as a script for her, so that is pretty sweet.  She and I used to do a webcomic together years and years ago, and I miss comics as a medium.  It’ll be cool to see what she does with the story visually.

3 Responses to “Random Thoughts #209”

  1. amber

    See? This is what I was talking about. This helps me. Knowing that people struggle, knowing that people keep going, etc. I need this in my life. Otherwise I just get down in the dumps and watch TV.

  2. Alex J. Kane

    That’s probably very true. Matthew Stover has a great philosophy on his blog. He says that if you follow a basic set of guidelines (basically Heinlein’s Rules, reworded to Stover’s tastes), then eventually you either:

    a) produce publishable fiction, and sell it/succeed, or
    b) you die

    Either way, he says, you get to satisfy your desire to write, and you get to live knowing that you never gave up the possibility of success in favor of accepting failure. Sort of a different way of looking at it, but nevertheless the truth that lies beneath Heinlein’s Rules is that eventually, if we abide by them, we will succeed. Unless fate drops an anvil on our heads.

Comments are closed.