It is July. At the end of _this_ month, I move to Texas. (eep!)
Started in on Chapter 3 today, managed 1000 words, so a reasonably good start. And I think I have a pretty good idea what needs to happen in this chapter. Hopefully, this week will be the week that I start to get ahead on my chapter-per-week goal…maybe finish Chapter 3 in the next day or two, and then get at least half of Chapter 4 done too.
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Submission #54 – to Town Drunk (my first sub there)
and
Rejection #45 – A lightning …
Sub #52 (over the weekend) – to Writers of the Future, my 7th sub there. I have my fingers crossed that this submission will be disqualified (as that would mean I’d placed in Q2, and could no longer enter).
Sub #53 – to Lone Star Stories, my 5th submission there.
And, this evening:
Rejection #44 – 5 days to a friendly, positive rejection from Fantasy magazine, with an added reminder that as of July 1, they are closed to submissions until November.
Today’s wordcount – 600 words on chapter 2.
Total weekly wordcount – 0
Abandoned the 300 words I wrote on Monday to make a fresh start on Chapter 2. Then wrote 600 words today, but decided I don’t like those either. I now have an outline that I think will work better, so hopefully tomorrow I can really get going on this week’s write-a-thon chapter.
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Sub#51 – to All Possible Worlds (my first sub there)
Sub #50 – to Fantasy Magazine (my 4th story there)
Also two recent rejections to report:
Rejection #41 – 8 days, from Shimmer
Rejection #42 – 42 days, from Realms of Fantasy. This is my second submission there. The first one got a ‘blue form of death,’ but this one was good enough to earn me the ‘yellow form of promise’ with a little scribbled note from the slush reader.
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Write-a-thon update (for yesterday) – 300 words on Chapter 2.
Now off to write some fresh words for today…
Three submissions out this morning:
Sub# 47 – to Strange Horizons (my 4th time subbing there)
Sub# 48 – to Heliotrope (2nd sub there)
Sub# 49 – to Shimmer (2nd sub there)
And, yesterday:
Rejection #39 – a 25-day (vaguely positive) rejection from Futurismic
Sub #46 – my first submission to Shimmer.
Rej #35 – from Lone Star Stories (24-hours)
Rej #36 – 3 days from Chizine…but the story got bounced not on its merits but because I made a mistake on the simultaneous submissions policy — starting on June 1 (the day I sent the submission) they switched over to contest-mode…and during the contest they DON’T take simultaneous submissions. So they pretty much looked at the cover-email and bounced the story back :( I felt bad for not paying closer attention, but the editor was very nice about it.
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…
Stories away! Submissions:
Sub #44 – to Lone Star Stories, my 4th sub there.
Sub #45 – to F&SF, my 10th sub there.
But also…stories bounce back:
Rej #34 – From Fantasy Magazine (33 days)
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Nine submissions out at the moment. Nine! Yay!
Submissions to Chizine (Sub #42) and Cemetery Dance (Sub #43). Haven’t subbed to either market before (most of my stuff isn’t dark enough), but it’s cool that they take simultaneous subs.
This gets me up to 8 stories in circulation, and I’ve got a few more that are close to being ready to go out. Maybe I’ll be able to get up to 10 stories out and about sometime in the near future…
Yesterday I went to a one-day Hugo House workshop with Karen Joy Fowler. The focus of the workshop was how to create characters and convey those characters in your writing. Karen was wonderful — very friendly and also a good teacher. A few tidbits:
When you have to come up with a character, use a character from a children’s book as a starting point. Characters in children’s books are distilled down and simplified.
Another good source of inspiration for characters is bits of conversation you hear. Often you get only a small piece of the conversation, but it can be …
Sub #39 – A pre-Clarion story to Lone Star Stories. This is the story I used for my application to Clarion. This is my third sub to Lone Star Stories.
Rejection #31 – About eight hours to a rejection from Lone Star (yes, they are fast!).
Sub #40 – to Futurismic (my first submission to that market).
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This weekend should be a good one for writerly activities. The construction crew that makes banging noises from 7:30 to 5:30 every day does NOT work on weekends, so Saturday I’m hoping to finish up the short-ish fantasy-ish story that …
