Finished off Chapter 4 for the write-a-thon this morning. This latest chapter is 3100 words, which brings my total wordcount up to 12,400.
I also wrote a flash story this morning. The idea has been knocking around in my head for a couple weeks now, so when I finally sat down to write, it went really quick.
I’m one of eight finalists for the 2nd Quarter (March 31st deadline) Writers of the Future competition. The story (can’t say which one, as judging is anonymous) was my sixth submission to the contest. Previously I had 4 stories that were quarter-finalists, and two that didn’t even make it that far.
The list of finalists is posted on the WotF blog: http://wotfblog.galaxypress.com/2007/06/writer-finalists-announced.html
Yay! Now I have to try to be patient while I wait the six-ish weeks it takes for them to judge the 8 finalist stories and pick the winners…
Rejection #33 – a 29-day rejection from Fantasy & Science Fiction. This was my 9th submission to F&SF, and was the first to make it up to Gordon. I’m relatively good about the reject, since at least it made it past JJA.
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In more cheerful news, I’ve finished the lighthearted action story that I’ve been working on. It ended up being 6000 words, not the just under 5,000 that I was expecting, but I’m feeling pretty good about it. If nothing else, it counts toward being productive.
I’m making slow and steady progress on my latest WIP…averaging maybe 700 words or so a day. It’s at 4000 words now, and has about a scene and a half left on it, I think. It’s a bit longer than I originally envisioned, but I think I can keep it under 5k (or trim it back down to 5k once it’s finished). This particular project is an attempt on my part to stretch as a writer and do something a bit different — it’s a lighthearted action story involving dragons. So far it seems to be going pretty well, at …
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 #37 to Realms of Fantasy (my 2nd submission there)
This is my 19th submission for 2007, which means I’ve sent out more subs so far this year than I sent out all of last year, and it’s only May :)
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I’m a thousand words into a new WIP — a fantasy story this time, since my brain wanted a break after doing the 6k SFnal one. I think the story’s nearly done, actually, so when it’s finished I might try to trim it down into a flash-length story.
Sub#36 – to F&SF
This gets me up to six stories out in circulation (still one short of my all-time high of seven, but up from a while ago when I was down to four).
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Productivity seems to come in bursts for me. After finishing up a longish SF story yesterday, I wrote a slightly-longer-than-flash (1.5k) dark fantasy story today, more or less in one sitting.
Last weekend I went to Peter Beagle’s one-day writing workshop at Hugo House. We did some writing exercises geared toward creating a distinctive voice: writing a monologue in a non-human voice, writing a dialog between two characters where it was clear who was speaking even without any tags. The exercises (at least for me) were as much about thinking from a different POV as they were about dialog per se. I wanted to generate dialog that was unique to the character on more than just the surface level of vocabulary and speech patterns.
tinaconnolly came to the Peter …
Outlines, character development, and other miscellaneous notes for the novel are finally coming together. Things are looking good to start writing at the beginning of May. I’ve also made another attempt at breaking off a chunk of the story to do as a short story (or it may end up being more of a novelette). Anyway, the bit I’m thinking about breaking off comes right near the start of the novel, so even if it doesn’t work on it’s own, I can convert it into chapters or something after the fact. Hopefully I’ll be able to write the story/novelette version …
Writing flash stories makes me feel very productive. When I’m writing longer stories, I can almost never finish a story in a day. Today though, I wrote a flash story. Only 700 words, which isn’t a lot, but I still *feel* productive because it’s a finished story.
