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.
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/
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!
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.
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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!
I thought this was incredibly cute, so I’ll share…
Every week at Clarion our class got gifts for the instructor that week. Over the course of the workshop, we developed a stuffed animal theme, where most gifts involved surgically altering a stuffed animal to make it relevant to a story that the instructor had written. Anyway, for our anniversary yesterday, my husband made me a stuffed animal *from scratch* from one of my pre-workshop stories. (Granted, the story involved alien creatures called ‘lumpies’ that were essentially big gray blobs, but still!!)
