July 2017 goals roundup and Another Story Acceptance!

First thing's first: I got another story acceptance!  My short story "A Thing With Feathers" will be published in Mythic Delirum. I don't know when/what issue yet, so I'll keep you posted, but (obviously) I am super excited about this. A lot of amazing writers have been in their pages, including their most recent issue, which features JANE YOLEN, Mari Ness, Sandra Odell, Jennifer Crow (and many more).

I still have 14 other stories on submission (Well, 13, one is simultaneously submitted) and getting an acceptance has of course given me renewed hopes for those. Though I've said this before on Twitter (and maybe here too, I can't remember), I have to assume each time I send a story out that the answer will be yes. Otherwise, I would get far too discouraged and not send any out at all. So that's 14 potential "yeses" (well 13, as flattering as it would be to have two markets fight over one of my stories I think it would be very bad form on my part). I don't even know what I'd do if everything came back 'yes'. Fly apart with joy, I guess? With how many submissions I've sent out this year, and how I've been perpetually submitting in such volume, I probably won't separately do a month of "submit a story every day" in October as I have for the past couple of years. Part of the goal of that was to consistently be getting my stories into slush piles, and especially this year, I haven't slacked off on that.

But July, July was an interesting writing month. I rewrote not one but two short stories in July. And yes, I did in fact finish editing down The Last Song, fulfilling my CampNaNoWriMo goal. Now I need to write it back up again! And THEN I can query with it anew.

June 2017 Goals roundup

So June was pretty great!

My short story "Daddy's Girl" was published in Syntax & Salt and a lot of people have shared it across Twitter and said very nice things about it, which I really appreciate and which thrills me to no end. I try to share short stories when I've really liked them, and follow the authors on Twitter, and in this instance that story is mine and that author is me and it's a lovely feeling. Additionally, the Syntax & Salt folks were very nice and easy to work with, and I'd like the stories they'd run previously, which is why I submitted mine.

Oh, so have you tried out Inspirobot? You should. It's an AI built to generate inspirational phrases, and slaps them onto images. It's....interesting. Sometimes perfect, sometimes hilarious. Sometimes both! I may inflict some of them on my writing group as writing prompts. We'll see.

Interestingly, so far, every story I have had accepted was either 1. accepted its first time submitted or 2. the first time I'd submitted a piece to that particular market. Obviously, this trend has to break at some point, as I have more stories and am constantly sending them out. Though I guess I need to take a break on that pretty soon, if I'm going to be doing October Madness again this year. Though the point of October Madness is to get myself submitting stories, without having lapses, and clearly that is no longer a problem for me. So we'll see.

There are any number of short stories I have (still, forever and always) that I have started and that need to be finished. Some which have been rejected enough that they've received large overhauls and rewrites, some slated to receive such a treatment. I've got one story that was not originally speculative but is now and (I think) works pretty well that way. We'll see what the rejection letters (or acceptance letters?) have to say about that.

In June I indeed wrote a new short story, a cyberpunk-ish sort of thing concerning biotech and limb/body part replacement and personal security. It was also a romance, very technically, and written to a prompt from my friend Tori (the author of Eelgrass), who was trying to prevent me from jumping the gun and submitting May's short story too early. Because I don't really write romance, it was an interesting challenge, and she gave me these stipulations: "1 kiss, one loving description of a butt, flowers exchanged, and a meet cure. I also want one witty banter, a shooting range, and an assassination attempt."  It is to my credit that I did not in fact just cheat and write a Shadowrun story using one of my characters. I did also write a couple of Shadowrun stories, a pair of which were very fun indeed because they were the same scene/situation from two perspectives.

I have decided for July's Camp NaNoWriMo that I'll be rewriting/revising The Last Song. I've made a new and improved playlist, I have the most current draft printed out, I've been circling the characters in my head and looking at Detroit things again. I've also had the thought that maybe I shouldn't write it from the perspective of my rock star Orpheus, but I think writing it from my modern day Eurydice's point of view isn't actually the best plan. It's possible, certainly, and though she needs to be represented far more strongly than my current text does, I don't think that's the correct frame. So we'll see what happens.

February 2016 goals roundup

Well, it's March already. How'd that happen?

In February, I wrote not 1 but 2 first drafts. And already wrote March's story. So I'm up to having written 4 new stories this year, one story ahead of goal. Plus, the writing workshop I run at the library has started again, and I wrote what might be the beginning of a longer piece, or might be a "finished" flash piece. So we'll see how I feel about that. When I look it over after it has some time to cure.

I've read 4 more books, with the 5th drawing to a close. I of course have more in the "To Be Read" pile. I always have more in the To Be Read pile.

I have not worked more on any of my novels. I had an irritating setback where Open Office decided the document was "locked" at one point, and so a full day's worth of edits were lost.

I have not sent out more queries for The Last Song. My other full request came back as a Revise and Resubmit, so I'm going to let that mull over while I wait to hear back on the other queries. The comments were good and make sense, but I don't want to plunge hastily into anything.

October report and NaNoWriMo doubts

All right, so October didn't really go as planned.

I mean, it kind of did. I sent out 21 submissions, 2 of which were queries for The Last Song. That's good progress, right? I've gotten 12 rejections back already, many of which came in the last week or so. 2 were personal, 10 were form.

But. In the middle of October, my organs staged a revolt (I am now acutely aware of where my kidneys are) and I'm still getting back on the horse from that. I haven't been reading anything, just watching stuff on Netflix and Amazon Prime. Other than yesterday's workshop, I haven't written a damn thing three weeks. So. It would seem NaNoWriMo isn't going to happen for me this year. Which is okay. I think I'm still pretty numbed from being sick and wanting to sleep all the time (okay, I still kind of want to sleep all the time).

My life isn't creatively bereft, anyway. We've got a lot of gaming going on still (I only missed a couple sessions of our assorted Pathfinder games through my sickness), including a new Shadowrun story in which I'm playing a decker (though not the same decker depicted in this post). It's probably the party role I've enjoyed best, though I did really like my brief stint as the Face (which is the person who arranges jobs and payments, does the risky purchasing, liasons with contacts, etc.)

Who are you people and why are you in my house?

Okay, we've slid past October's halfway point. Where am I? Where are you?

oh, the synopsis

I'm working on my synopsis for The Last Song, and I stumbled upon this lovely picture. It's beautiful and says everything I need it to. The trick is making people forget this is how things end (provided they know/recognize the myth to begin with). At least one of my readers was, in fact, "fooled" 'til the last line.

I really need a snappy title for my link posts

All right, another lazy link roundup (ooh, should I call it that? Lazy Link Roundup™? Has somebody already thought of that?)

I'm about 4k words behind on my CampNaNoWriMo project. Still doable, certainly. I haven't lowered my word count goal yet.

Found on Imgur, but also on this Buzzfeed post

Selections from my bookmarks

I've been bookmarking links for years. You know how it goes; you see something you want to read, but maybe you're not in the mood for it right that second. Or maybe you don't have time. So it goes.

My bookmarks are fairly..er.."organized". I have many folders, have had good intentions for all of the headings. Some of them pertain directly to particular writing projects (so I've got ones called "Rebel yell" and "Detroit"), at least three are for recipes I've almost certainly never cooked, and many are just things I thought might be interesting. One folder is called "inspiration", because of the piles of information in it, there's sure to be story fodder.

So, while looking at those bookmarks instead of editing The Last Song, I found a few I figured I'd share. In a way, they're loosely connected in my mind.

I thought these pictures were eye-catching, and would eventually lead me to some story or another. They're all from the 40's, if memory serves, though they're in color (!).

This one is from XKCD, and is a Radiation Dose Chart, using Sieverts, which is the unit for an absorbed dose, named after Rolf Maximilian Sievert, who studied the biological effects of radiation.

Here's A-E on The Observatory ~ The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy. Links on the bottom take you to the rest of the definitions on the site. I'm glad I re-found this one, as I've been trying to build the vernacular for my science fiction space culture. The writer also has the blog Rocketpunk Manifesto, which looks to have even more great information on it.

And I forgot about this charming Forbes article, Why I Named my Dog After Neil Armstrong, published in 2012 not long after Neil Armstrong himself passed away.

My Process

My process, such as it is, tends to be rather private.

Or, at any rate, I'm not really social while I'm writing. When I'm really into it, sleepwalking the dreamscape of my inner mullings, transposing them onto the page, I don't want to be bothered. I don't want to talk. I don't want to be interrupted.

Sometimes I listen to the same song, over and over. For the mood I'm in, or the emotions it evokes, or the memories it dredges up from that subconscious I try to mine while I'm awake. For The Last Song, there have been a few songs: "One", covered by Warren Haynes at Bonnaroo. "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", covered by Nirvana. A lot of Nirvana in general. "Everlong", by the Foo Fighters, both the acoustic version and the regular album one.

I remember the first time I heard the acoustic version of Everlong. It was on the radio, probably Rat Rock, and I was driving home uncommonly late one night. Had I gone to see a movie? That seems likely. I was in my Honda, a 1992 five speed hand me down from my dad, with its Grateful Dead Space your Face sticker in the rear passenger window, and the Shrinky Dink fish, fishing lined to the rearview mirror. It was summer, so all of my windows were down (I eschew air conditioning, for one, and it had also broken in said Honda a year or two previous on the return drive from Cape Hatteras, NC), and it was the dewy, overcast pink skied Jersey Shore summer that happens sometimes, where it isn't raining and probably won't, and the next day will be a completely clear, perfect, humidity free beach day where the edges of everything seem just a little bit sharper, and you probably forget to apply, or reapply, your sunscreen. There was nobody else on the road, and I slowed down. The limit on the back road I drove was thirty, but I didn't want to get home before the song was over, and I dipped to twenty five, twenty, dropped it to second gear. I'd kicked off my flip flops and drove barefoot, toes curled over the top of the gas pedal, right hand on the gearshift. When the song was over, I turned the radio off. I didn't want to hear any other songs, any commercials, any other voices. I didn't want the spell to be broken.

So, when I listen to songs on repeat, or listen to a certain sequence of songs on repeat, I don't want the spell to be broken. I want to sustain it for as long as possible, make it as complete as possible. I don't want anybody in the room to remark upon my musical choices. I don't want anybody to ask me what I'm doing. I don't want a phone, or social media. I'd prefer Elka not have to go out. I don't want neighbors. Just the words on the page (text on the screen). Just the characters of my making, living their lives, thinking their thoughts, feeling their feels.