revisions – Caroline M. Yoachim

Another sub…and the realization that not all revisions are improvements

Sub#74 – to Weird Tales (my first sub there)

I’ve been struggling with this story, revising it and revising it, and I looked at the most recent version this morning and it was pretty terrible. Basically, in trying to fix this problem or that problem (over a series of drafts), I’d shredded the story into an incoherent mess. So instead of starting with the most recent version, I went backwards (not to the original draft, but to the first revision), and from there made a few changes, and suddenly the story worked.

* * *

This puts me at TEN …

Productivity

After spending several days making extremely slow progress on revisions for one of my Clarion West stories, I changed gears today and worked on a story idea I had last night. It’s now early afternoon, and I’ve finished the story (it’s pretty short, about 2k, but it still feels good to have finished something). I even did a round of revisions, so the draft is pretty clean.

Also, recently:

Submission #66 – To Coyote Wild (my first sub there)

and

Rejection #59 – A 98-day, round 3 rejection from Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine

* * *

And now, back to …

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 # 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 …

Submission #20

Packaged up my backwards-in-time story so that it can go out in the mail tomorrow. I’ve decided to send it off to Asimov’s next, and it’ll be my first sub to that market (mainly because I’m impatient, and the turnaround time there is not quite as quick as, say, F&SF or SH). I tweaked a couple things in the opening scene before stuffing the story into an envelope — mostly just smoothing out the language a little bit.

Despite not getting any actual writing done this weekend, I’m feeling pretty productive. In addition to getting my Asimov’s sub prepped, I …

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 …

Submission #12 and more new words

I’m eligible for Clarkesworld again (can’t submit for seven days after a reject), so I sent another one their way. I’m hoping that Nick will like bloody-throated birds better than giant spiders.

My not-so-alternate-history story continues to grow at a steady pace, I’m up to 3000 words now. This is the point at which it has fallen apart before, but I give myself permission to write the rest as complete crap if necessary, just to get it done. I’m also trying to resist the urge to start over and tweak the beginning–this is what got me into trouble the first …

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, …

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!

Tag: revisions