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Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

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.

Days Like These

Finally started a new short story, one of three I intend to write this month.  It’s going to be a bit of a challenge because I’m trying to keep it under 4k words and write about two star-crossed lovers on a dying Earth who happen to be teenaged boys.  It’s different, but I feel like writing a love story.  It will get me back in the mood to work on Chwedl, or something.

To write the beginning I ended up watching rocket take-offs on youtube.  For research. Really.

And people wonder why I choose to write science fiction and fantasy? Heh.

Now to find that awesome article in one of my Analogs’ about lunar bases and space stations.  And figure out how I want this story to end.

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.

This Week In Writing

I’m putting the novel edit on hold this week in favor of finishing the edit on one of my short stories.  The reason for this?  It’s here.  This anthology was the whole reason my little 12 year old self started writing fantasy short stories.   I’m not sure the story I’ve got that is closest to being done is really exactly suited for this.  I’m going to rework the beginning and see how I feel about it.  I have a couple others that are nowhere near as polished that I could possibly rework also.  The reading period doesn’t begin for almost two weeks, so we’ll see what I can accomplish in that time frame.

So the plan for this week: rewrite the beginning of Monsters, look over my other short pieces and see what I have that might work, and just basically get back into the writing every day groove now that my uberlong work week is over.  2 hours a day, whether I need it or not.

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