Writing flash stories makes me feel very productive. When I’m writing longer stories, I can almost never finish a story in a day. Today though, I wrote a flash story. Only 700 words, which isn’t a lot, but I still *feel* productive because it’s a finished story.
WnIP = Work NOT in Progress
I had the best of intentions for trimming off a small corner of my novel-ish idea and writing it up as a short story, but the ideas kept squirming away from me. Over the past couple days I easily made the quota of 1500 words, but not in story text — I wrote several pages of additional notes. I’ll give myself a couple more weeks to lay out the ideas/characters/etc in notes and get some outlining done, and I’ll start in on novel writing probably around the beginning of May.
Rejection #24 – 6-day …
1,445 words today. Not quite up to the 1.5k quota, but I’m at a stopping point so I’m going to go ahead and call it ‘close enough for government work.’ My brain has turned to mush anyway. The story isn’t coming out quite the way I envisioned it, which might end up being a problem or it might be okay. Still too soon to say.
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 …
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 …
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.
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!
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.
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 …
