Caroline M. Yoachim

JaNoWriMo

Since November was a bit too crazy for novel writing, I’ve joined up with some of my Clarion classmates for JaNoWriMo – JAnuary NOvel WRIting MOnth. In the interest of saving myself some prep work (January being right around the corner and all), I’ve opted to set my novel in the same world as ‘Tending the Mori Birds,’ which is the short story I sold to _Fantasy Magazine_. I consider this to be entirely a practice novel, so I’m going to do my best to burn through it as quickly as possible, and treat it solely as a learning experience. …

Rejection #14, Submissions 17 & 18

Reject #14 – Didn’t place in WotF, so my mechanical duck story can start making the rounds to other markets.

And going out tomorrow:

17. Spiders to WotF
18. Mechanical Duck to F&SF

Rejection #13

38-day form rejection of spiders from Strange Horizons arrived in my email this morning. The story had been out long enough that I had my hopes up for at least some personal comments, but oh well. Next up for the spiders is Realms of Fantasy, but the submission will have to wait until after Christmas since I’m heading down to Olympia for the next few days.

Submission #16

Well, my backwards-in-time story (freshly rejected from F&SF) is all packaged up to go to Analog. I decided that I wasn’t happy with the opening on the F&SF version, so I made some minor adjustments. It is a tricky thing, deciding whether or not to change a draft before resending. I have a tendancy to feel rather negative about drafts that come back rejected, and so that can bias me to want to fiddle with things that may not actually need it. BUT, thinking back to when I sent this out, I wasn’t entirely happy with the opening few paragraphs …

Alas

Rejection #12 – standard issue 7-day “no grab” from JJA at F&SF

Returning to Normalcy

Peter and I snuck off during the week last week to go skiing up at Mt. Baker, which was lovely. Plenty of coverage on the slopes, and it snowed a bit while we were there, so the conditions were pretty good except for when the snow/wind reduced visibility to almost nil. We got back on Friday afternoon, and (surprise!) no power at our apartment. A huge storm had come through Thursday night and many, many trees fell over. (I have pictures of one such tree, and pretty mountain scenery from skiing, that I’ll be posting on my Flickr account when …

My refrigerator says:

“If sanguine thoughts about a pithy question are represented crassly, society will abscond with beer.”

(Isn’t magnetic poetry fun?)

Subscribe. Do it now.

Fantasy Magazine is running a wonderful holiday subscription special. Here are the details:

* * * * * * *

This is a first for us, but we’re now offering an online holiday special for Fantasy Magazine, both for US and overseas subscriptions, which boils down to ten dollars and thirty dollars, respectively, for four issues.

US: http://wildsidepress.3dcartstores.com/Fantasy-Magazine-4-issue-US-subscription-HOLIDAY-SPECIAL_p_21-38.html

Overseas: http://wildsidepress.3dcartstores.com/Fantasy-Magazine-4-issue-international-subscription-HOLIDAY-SPECIAL_p_35-45.html

Please spread the good word or gift a subscription to friends and family; or try out a magazine that we all feel very strongly about, and that we hope that readers will agree, once they’ve gotten alook at and …

The Basics, Revisited

Back when I first started writing, I spent a fair amount of time looking through ‘how to write’ books (most useful for me being Sol Stein’s “On Writing”). Lately, while I’ve been happy with my stories on a word by word level, I haven’t been as thrilled with the bigger structure of the stories. So I decided it was time to have another look at some of the technique books to see if I can glean new insights from them now that I’ve had a bit more practical experience.

My focus-of-the-moment is to look for ways to make the words …

Submission #14

Encouraged by my recent sale, I did another pass of revisions on my giant spider story and sent it off to Strange Horizons.

:: fingers crossed ::