Caroline M. Yoachim

Six scenes in four days

That’s the goal. I have a story outline with six scenes, and I want it to be a complete draft by the end of the day on Sunday, which gives me 4 days (not including today). I’ll be shooting for a total wordcount of 5,000 words (which is the max length for the market I have in mind for this story). I suspect I’ll end up a bit over that, but I can trim later if need be.

Word quotas have worked well for me in the past, so I’ll try it again. Minimum output of 1.5k per day, starting …

Noise, Productivity, and a Story that Wants to be a Novel

There is an inverse relationship between ambient noise and my level of productivity. As noise increases, my productivity goes down. My apartment building is under construction. They are replacing the roof. Or dropping elephants onto it. Hard to say for sure, based on the noise.

*wanders off to find noise-cancelling headphones*

In other news, I tried to start in on a short story today, and the silly thing thinks it wants to be a novel. This is a new problem for me. Until recently, I tended to write everything pretty short (stories averaging 3k). Now I’ve developed more of an …

Rejection #23, Submission #31

R23 – As I suspected might be the case, the flash fiction story I sent to Postcards from Hell was insufficiently hellish. So…

Sub31 – Flash fiction to Glimmer Train, using their nifty online submissions system.

I think this officially makes April “new market month” as this is my fourth sub so far this month, all of which went to markets I hadn’t tried before.

Super Submission Monday

Subs 28-30: Three subs out today, all to new-for-me markets. One to Realms of Fantasy, one to Heliotrope, and one to a writing contest being run by Hugo House (details here: http://nwmediaarts.livejournal.com/ but it’s only open to residents of the Pacific Northwest).

This gets me back up to seven stories in circulation. Yay!

Reject-o-Rama

Rejection #21 – Apparently the folks over at WotF are not big fans of giant spiders.

Haven’t checked my spreadsheet, but I think the spiders are due to go to Realms of Fantasy next. That’d be a new market for me, and one that I’ve been meaning to sub to for a while.

And then, on the same day (except that I didn’t bother picking up yesterday’s mail until this morning)…

Rejection #22 – From Asimov’s

That makes 3 rejections in as many days. Expect a post tomorrow listing off a bunch of submissions…

Q: How long does it take to make a web page?
A: Too long.

I’ve decided the time has come to make myself a web page. I want to put up a gallery of my stock photos, an assortment of links, a blurb about forthcoming publications, that sort of thing. Nothing too fancy, but I *do* want it to look nice.

Making web pages that look nice is hard.

Follow-up Q: How long does it take to switch livejournal layouts/colorschemes?
A: Two minutes.

Yay productivity!

Submission #27 – Flash fiction to Postcards from Hell.

I revised not one but *two* stories today. One was the flash story, which I submitted. The other was a substantially longer piece, that I needed to trim by several hundred words. The somewhat-shortened longer story is now awaiting crits with one of my crit groups. Cutting 700 words from a 5,700 word story was hard. I had to do it in three passes, with each pass resulting in fewer anti-words. I’m tentatively pleased with the result…we’ll see what my critters have to say about it.

Was good to have had …

submission, rejection, headache

Sub #26 – a drabble, which is a story of exactly 100 words, something I’d never tried before.

So, for a brief period of time I was up to *six* items in circulation. Then,

Rejection #20.

*sigh* Need to think about how I want to shuffle things. In addition to what’s out there, I have a flash fiction piece that I’m going to touch up a bit and send out hopefully this weekend. Then I’d be up to seven. Drabble and Flash stories are a good way to get ones submission numbers up in a hurry!

Completely unrelated to all …

Hugo House Workshop – Terry Bisson

Got to spend the day on Sunday learning about short fiction from Terry Bisson as part of the Hugo House series of one day workshops (http://www.nwmediaarts.com/2007Event-Workshops.html). About a month ago I went to one of the other workshops in this series, where I learned about ‘middles’ from Connie Willis. Therefore, I was pleased when Terry announced that we would be learning about ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings.’ So in theory, I should be able to write a complete story now :) We also spent a lot of time on how to convey information using dialogue, which I found very helpful.

Some tidbits:

…

Submission # 25 and random thoughts on revisions

Sub 25 – Did some light revisions to the story that came back from F&SF (mainly tweaking the opening), came up with a (hopefully) better title, and shipped it out to Writers of the Future. This is my sixth entry to WotF.

Holding steady at 5 stories out to market at the moment. I’ve got one more almost ready to go (a flash story), and a bunch of things that need revisin’. Some writers thrive on revisions. I am not one of those writers. Little revisions I can handle, no worries. Tweak this, adjust that. But when I have to …