Visions of Slush Piles Dance in My Head
The thought comes to me every few months or so: maybe I should volunteer as a slush reader. I always decide not to, usually because of time constraints, but the thought is persistent. I suspect I will eventually give in and do it. That leaves the questions: when? which? I can’t answer those. I will answer the question: why?
Reason #1: The Learning Curve When I do something sub-standard in a story, I have to send it out to different zines and collect rejections and maybe a few comments before I recognize what horrible sin was committed on the page. Those sins tend to be invisible to me in my own work. But in other people’s work, the flaws are more obvious because my appreciation of their story is limited to what is on the page and is not amplified by pre-existing visions in my own head. Seeing these shortcomings repeatedly will help me recognize them in my own work. This particularly holds true for the attention-grabbing needs of a story. I know a lot of writers/slushers who insist it was reading countless bad openings that taught them to avoid those mistakes in their own work. That would probably be a good thing for me.
Reason #2: Community Immersion I am a SF writer, a small time blogger, and a member of the Codex writing group. I have attended a few local cons and participated (briefly) with the local NaNoWriMo group. That is how the SF community knows me, those few that do know me. Slushing would add a dimension to my involvement in the community and give me another hat to be recognized in. I love the SF community (okay, I love a lot of it…there are back alleys I avoid) and would like to be a more recognized player.
Reason 3: Making SF a Jobby-type Job Every writer will tell you that writing is a job. Saying it doesn’t make it so, though. It’s still a hobby for me. I do it when I want for as long as I can squeeze in the time, but it stays on the bottom shelf in order of priority. It is likely that slushing would actually subtract from the time I get to write. However, it would be something I needed to keep up with, something people needed from me and thus something I couldn’t put off indefinitely (unlike my novel, the poor fella). Sure, most slushers dare I say all?) are unpaid volunteers, but I’m not looking for the paycheck part of a job.
Reason #4: To Feel Valued If I’m making life and death decisions about stories, that means someone trusts my opinion to some degree. That has meaning to me. It feels good. I want that warm, fuzzy feeling coming from SF.
Reason #5: Editorial Empathy I am a fairly empathic person. Not psychic empathic, just I like to consider how other people feel. Editorial staffs can be tough to empathize with since I’ve never done what they do. Slushing isn’t editing a magazine, but it’s a toe into their world. Then at least my toe could be more empathetic.
So I won’t likely pound on any doors for slushing gigs at the moment, but I’ve thought it through and I’ll eventually be on the lookout for something. I think Apex was looking for slushers recently, but I don’t know that my tastes are quite in line with theirs. I write dark stuff, but only certain shades of dark. Maybe I’m just waiting for the right opportunity to present itself. Or maybe I’m just after the best of both worlds: feeling good about myself because I want to slush without having to actually do any work.
Maybe that will be a new year’s resolution: find a slushing gig. Hmmm…something to think about.
Newcomer to my Free Fic
I put a new story up in the Free Fiction section of this blog. Not new per se, but not one that’s ever been offered for free. “Brother Goo” was originally printed in Beyond Centauri from my good pals at Sam’s Dot Publishing. It’s a kids magazine (something like 8 to 18) so this won’t be a dark, gritty story. Middle Grade fiction is probably what it should be classified as.
And don’t forget to follow links to my stories in free online archives. “ZFL“, “The Drake’s Eye“, and “How Quickly We Forget” are all available through Every Day Fiction. “Leech Run” can be read or listened to at Escape Pod. All these links are in my bibliography, but I recreated them here, too. Links to places to buy books/magazines containing my stories can also be found on my bibliography. A couple of those are available as ebooks, too.
Read, enjoy.
My new writing toy
No, my new writing toy is not a new computer. Not a tablet, not a voice recorder, not voice-to-text software. Don’t worry, you can still get me any one of those for Christmas.
I finally broke down and bought Scrivener for Windows. I purchased it with my 20% NaNoWriMo discount which expired yesterday. It was a bit of an impulse buy, seeing the discount tick away, but I’d been thinking about it for a couple months.
I haven’t written anything with it yet. I watched the tutorial video and I really liked the idea of it. I intend to import my novel into it as soon as I finish the steampunk story that will never end. (Hmm…there’s something to that…but I digress.) The index card system really seemed to fit my scattered style. I can outline as much or as little as I want and adjusting the outline brings the part of the story I need to adjust right to my fingertips. I’ll be sure to update here when I get things going.
I also intend to use Scrivener for the Codex Weekend Warrior contest, an in-house flash fic contest. Between the two [novel and flash], I should get a decent overview of how useful the software can be for my writing style.
I should pull the steampunk story in too, especially since I plan to do a lot of restructuring once my first draft is finished, but I don’t want to waste time learning the formatting tools while working toward a deadline. So steampunk stays in Word for now.
Hopefully I’ll have an update in a couple months on how it’s all working. My New Year’s resolution may well be to do all my writing in Scrivener. We’ll see how it goes.
Have any testimonials about Scrivener? Any warnings? Any favorite tricks? Let me know. I could use all the help I can get.
A Captive Audience
I sold a reprint to a mainstream market! Well, kind of a mainstream market. Okay, it’s Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader’s Flush Fiction Anthology. So it’s better than a mainstream market; this book will be sitting someplace where it’s bound to get picked up and read!
It’s a new life for “Excuse Me”. It originally ran in The Rejected Quarterly in full 1500-word hilarity. I shaved it down to size and now it’s flash funny. (Okay, I am contractually obligated to say “make that FLUSH funny.” Okay, not so much obligated as mildly amused.)
Not sure of the details of when it’ll be out or anything. More when I find out more. I can say I that I love the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series and I’m stoked to be a part of their first foray into fiction. What better to put in a bathroom reader than a story about time traveling flatulence?
Five out the door
Once again my story submissions have slipped past my notice and the number of stories in circulation reached dangerously low levels. I managed to get five back out the door this weekend with another five lying in wait of attention. Maybe I’ll get them out by week’s end.
I need to do a thorough, introspective analysis of why I don’t do a better job of keeping them moving. Heck, one of those had only been to one market…in January. I let a perfectly good story sit and fester for ten months? Okay, it wasn’t really a “perfectly good” story. I recently described it as “unsaleable” which is pretty much the opposite of “perfectly good”. I was wrong, though, and now the story is out in the world, rubbing elbows with perfectly good stories. I’m making it a personal goal to sell that one.
I won’t wax on about how I need to get in gear on my steampunk story. That horse has been beaten to death. I made a little progress over Thanksgiving, but I need to grind out about 8k by Thursday to meet my goal of a finished draft by month’s end. Yeah…no point exploring the odds of that happening.
More when it’s less 1-AM-ish.
Look for Me on Boxing Day
The day after Christmas, a time where people sit around the house and decompress. A perfect day to read a story from Daily Science Fiction. At least I’m hoping so since that’s the day my story “Ten Seconds” is scheduled to be released. It’s a fun little piece starring some middle grade students. Another flash, but I’ve gotten pretty decent at writing those.
“Ten Seconds” marks my sixth publication of a story 1000 words or less; seventh if you count “Not Rats” which was originally flash then edited to longer. Quite a ratio of flash to other. It explains why I’m having so much trouble writing longer stuff.
I’m currently tapping away at a novelette-length piece, that steampunk story I keep mentioning. I’d be a lot further with it if some personal stuff hadn’t come up and derailed my life. Nothing I want to talk about, but a definite life-changing moment I’d sooner forget. Anyway, after that it’s back to my festival-of-the-naked-man novel (title still pending, but I’m leaning toward Naked). The NaNoWriMo time travel novel has been pretty much abandoned for life plus twenty. I’m thinking of following Naked with a revision of my very first completed story, a fantasy novel of the ripping-off-Harry variety. There’s Codex’s Weekend Warrior contest in there somewhere — January, I think — which means bucketloads of new flash to play with.
Yeah, writing has slowed down for me of late but it’s far from abandoned. It’s not even 10:30 yet, maybe I should go get a few hundred more words into my steampunk story.
Happy Thanksgiving. (Or to those not under the Stars and Stripes, Happy Thursday.)
Zombie Football League
My story “ZFL” went live on Every Day Fiction today. It’s fun. Read it.
White Flag
Ten days. That was as long as I lasted before reality set in and I surrendered to not finishing NaNoWriMo. I am a schnitzel.
It’s a matter of pragmatism. I am currently incapable of reaching the 50,000 word goal by the end of November without fracturing an already delicate priority system. Here are the bullet points that led me to this conclusion.
- The demands of my day job have increased. Substantially. I am behind on everything and this weekend is time to either catch up work or on WriMo. Not both.
- I am woefully behind already. My fault? Definitely. The story I am working on is not a story. All I really have is a milieu. The characters are cardboard, but the kind of cardboard you can stand up. The plot is thinner than Kate Moss. I’m not opposed to fighting to salvage a crappy novel on a deadline, but not at the expense of my day job, especially with no monetary prospect at the end.
- I do have a novelette to work on that does have a monetary prospect at the end of the rainbow. It was a bit asinine of me to take on NaNoWriMo with that project swaying in the breeze.
- I have “stuff going on at home” that’s none of your business.
I’ve done the math. Not happening. I have set a new goal of finishing the novelette by November 30th. With my current workload and the holiday looming, that’s still a significant aspiration, but one that won’t get me fired or alienate my family. And my novel? It’s going back in the drawer to await the rest of its skeleton before I heap any more innards into the mess.
Oh, you eat the peanut butter and jelly at the same time? Good idea.
After some soul searching that had nothing to do with typing, I’ve decided to stick out the Time Travel story, at least for the moment. I’d also like to travel back to when I started it and do it right…but clearly that’s not happening. I think I realized, however, why the story and I weren’t getting along.
I’ve been focusing on one plot. The whole idea was to have multiple plotlines swimming around each other and building into something. This was still the plan, but the tread that was expected to get the ball rolling has actually proven to be the muck that stopped said ball and another (more exciting) plot should be moving simultaneously. I had considered a chapter zero; what I need is chapters 0, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, and on while the plot I’ve been pursuing takes place simultaneously (in different times, of course).
I’ve also put too little consideration into the limitations of the time machine. It’s not what the machine can do that’s interesting; it’s the stuff it can’t do.
So, as I suspected, I leaped into this project too early and I’ve only been spreading on one slice of bread. Time to work with the other slice and (much later) figure out how to build a sandwich out of the two halves. And I need to do this stuff soon; I’m at least two full days behind in the word count department.
Alas, the Naked Man must wait. Hmmm, that didn’t sound quite right…
NaNo Blues
I am a slow typist. I’ve known this for a while. I should probably learn to type from the home row rather than using my mutli-finger hunt-and-peck method. But I’m not there yet. This contributes to me being 2500 words behind on my NaNoWriMo story. Contributes, but it’s not the cause.
I’m bogging down on my novel. I do this, it’s part of my process. My WotF story was flying along great until the end where it kept bogging down and kept bogging down. It took me months to write the ending. Why so long? Because I was trying to write an ending that didn’t fit. The scene I’m bogging in now fits the novel, but isn’t propelling the story like it should. I need to cut a lot of the words I’ve written, if I’m being honest. And I need to write a Chapter zero (can be renumbered later) so that the oddities of the story are more obvious when they arise. It should come out a bit like the opening scene in The Matrix, only not quite so Matrixy.
I didn’t do my homework on the front (outlining) end so now I’m suffering on the writing end. This may not have been the right project to try to NaNo. Temptations to return to my Naked Man novel (you heard right) are growing. Since this is more about my career than about the challenge, I’m seriously considering it.
If you don’t care what I choose to do, by all means, stop reading now and I’ll vow to be more interesting next time.
Still with me. Really? Okay, I guess you can watch me weigh the pros and cons of each project:
Time Travel Novel: Pros
- Good practice to stick with one project through completion.
- Marketable concept.
- Flexibility in plot/characters.
Time Travel Novel: Cons
- Will require a lot of cuts (later) to anything I write right now.
- Lack of project enthusiasm.
- A lot of historical research needed.
Naked Man Novel: Pros
- Theme is integral to the story.
- I know where the story is supposed to be going.
- Unique and original.
- In a subgenre where I’ve had past success.
Naked Man Novel: Cons
- Requires a lot of cultural and language research (mostly Japanese).
- Haven’t worked on it in 6 months.
- Questionable marketability.
I hate the thought that this Time Travel novel may just end up in the also-ran pile of 10-20% finished novels, but it’s dreck. I started decorating the cake before it was baked, now it’s just a flat, gooey mess. Upside: I seem to be at a similar wordcount in these two manuscripts, so switching horses in midstream will have no real mathematical or moral dilemma when I report wordcounts to NaNoWriMo.
