Caroline M. Yoachim

Like pulling teeth. . .

Day 4 of JaNo – 2059 words today, 9017 total

Slow going today, and I think what I ended up with was mostly pretty nasty stuff. I did manage to come up with some new creatures though, towards the end of the day, and I think that saved it. Oddly enough, I’m having a much easier time writing the chapters that come from the POV of what I thought was the secondary character. I think, though that he might be the more interesting of the two main POV characters I’ve got so far, so I may have to think about …

Good progress today

Day 3 of JaNo – 2,681 words today, 6958 total

Wrote all of chapter 3 this morning, and got a fair bit into chapter 4. I’ll definitely need to sit down this afternoon though, and outline what comes next, as chapter 4 is the last chapter for which I have a detailed outline. In addition to getting pretty good wordcount today, I’m feeling a bit happier with how the words came out. The first couple chapters had a decidedly choppy feel, almost more like detailed outlines than chapters, but today’s stuff reads a little smoother. Fingers crossed that I’m starting …

Writing in the Rain

Not literally, of course, as I’m inside and the rain is outside. But the weather has turned nasty once again, and with all the wind and rain I’m a bit worried that the power will go out.

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Day 2 of JaNoWriMo – 2090 words today, 4277 total

My chapters are ending up rather shorter than I expected, which may be an artifact of my quota system. (I’m shooting for 2000 words per day, and the chapters are ending up 2k long.) More likely, I just tend to write things on the short side (I often end up …

And so it begins…

Happy New Year!

All the cool kids are posting summaries of 2006 on their blogs, so here’s mine: 16 short story submissions, resulting in 12 rejections and 1 acceptance (3 stories are currently out at markets). Not the most impressive numbers, but 2006 was a ramping-up year for me, writing-wise, with most of the submissions going out in the second half of the year. Attending Clarion helped me be more confident in sending stories out, as did friendly competition with my Clarion classmates (and not-so-friendly threats from a certain stuffed Zebra).

Hopefully I’ll have bigger numbers this year (I subbed …

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 …