Uncategorized – Page 34 – Caroline M. Yoachim

And this happy little fellow is called the gouger…

Have to head to the dentist this afternoon to have a filling replaced. Shudder.

In more cheerful news, tomorrow I’m heading out to the coast for a few days. There are some gorgeous beaches with nifty rock formations and tidepools, so it should be a good place to play photographer. And I’ll also be able to hit the Dungeness Crab festival in Port Angeles. Yum!

I have to assume that when I come back from my little jaunt all rested and recovered, I’ll be bursting with energy to work on one of my three new stories. I keep starting them, …

Submissions #10 and #11

Repackaged my spiders and sent them out to Clarkesworld a while back. They’ve got a quick turnaround time, so I should hear back on that one pretty soon. And, stretching my 3-subs-by-the-end-of-September deadline a bit, my Mori (formerly Kali) Birds are sealed up in their envelope and ready to go out in the mail to F&SF tomorrow.

Adventures in Portland

Kelly Link gave a reading at Powell’s Books on Friday, which was a good excuse for me to head down to Portland to visit tinaconnolly. In addition to the reading (which was excellent–I expected Kelly to read something from Magic for Beginners, but instead she read a story that isn’t out in print yet), we wandered around in Washington Park, found some delicious dark chocolate, and drank mojitos…All in all a very fun trip! I snapped a few pictures, which are up on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/78523822@N00/

Rejection #8, Submission #9

Return of the Spiders…
My spiders failed to crawl up out of the slush pile at F&SF. I probably could just repackage them and send them back out, but I’ve had a couple thoughts on revising them that I might play around with first.

Ducks away!
Sent off my submission for this quarter’s Writers of the Future on Thursday. Hope they like mechanical ducks!

POETIC IMAGE NUMBER 37 NOT FOUND

Sat down at my computer to work on one of my new stories (I have two different things that I’ve started post-clarion I’m not making much progress on), but the words won’t come. Or they do come, but they’re completely the wrong words. The problem is that I’ve lost the creative intensity of the workshop. There’s no way to maintain that level of productivity and energy indefinitely, of course, but lately I’m feeling like a firefly that can’t light up.

Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!

Well, I’ve done a third pass on my spiders, and they are now neatly packaged up and ready to go to F&SF in tomorrow’s mail (aka, I’m setting them free…hehe). That’s one down and two to go for the submission challenge (3 subs in Sept). Submission number two is in pretty good shape, and it’ll probably go to WotF. Submission number three…*shrug* There’s still a fair amount of time left, I’m sure something will come to me :)

Thanks to the excellent recommendations of my Clarion classmates, I’ve been reading tons of great SF lately (in reverse chronological order): Marooned …

More photos than words…

I’ve been spending more time on photography lately than writing (thus the new icon – for bigger pix check out my flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/78523822@N00/ ). It’s not necessarily a bad thing…photography is easier on my wrists, but still keeps the creative juices flowing.

This is not to say I haven’t gotten any writing done. Mostly I’ve been focusing my energies on revisions – I polished up my twice-workshopped draft of my spider story and did a first pass of revision on one of my other Clarion stories. I’m still stalled out on my fresh stuff, but rather than force it, …

Artificial Deadlines

Well, I finally met my goal of writing a post-Clarion story. No, it isn’t the one I was working on when I wrote my last post. Yes, it’s flash fiction. And it’s more than a week late for the deadline. (I think the deadline went by so fast that there was a doppler effect on the whooshing noise it made!) As a result, I find myself questioning the utility of self-imposed deadlines as a motivational tool — they just don’t have the bite of real deadlines. So I think I’ll try writing without deadlines for a bit and see how …

Time to start something new…

Well, I got the spiders revised by Sunday, and haven’t done much in the way of writing since then, so the time has come to post another goal…a brand new story by August 27th. I haven’t picked out an idea yet, but I do have a few things swirling around in my head.

I’m hoping to set up a pattern for myself where I alternate between writing something new and revising the stories I wrote at Clarion. That way I’ll always have something to do while the fresh stories sit for a bit, and I’ll always have a backlog of …

Still Fighting with Spiders

Well, Friday came and went, and I still haven’t finished my revisions :( I did get a complete second draft done, but once I’d fixed the problems from the first draft, a whole new set of problems cropped up that need fixin’ before I can call the story truly revised. Oh well. I have ideas for what I want to do, so my new goal is to have these revisions done by tomorrow. I just hope I’m not making things worse with all this editing!

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