writing – Page 4 – Caroline M. Yoachim

WnIP, Rejection 24

WnIP = Work NOT in Progress

I had the best of intentions for trimming off a small corner of my novel-ish idea and writing it up as a short story, but the ideas kept squirming away from me. Over the past couple days I easily made the quota of 1500 words, but not in story text — I wrote several pages of additional notes. I’ll give myself a couple more weeks to lay out the ideas/characters/etc in notes and get some outlining done, and I’ll start in on novel writing probably around the beginning of May.

Rejection #24 – 6-day …

WIP

1,445 words today. Not quite up to the 1.5k quota, but I’m at a stopping point so I’m going to go ahead and call it ‘close enough for government work.’ My brain has turned to mush anyway. The story isn’t coming out quite the way I envisioned it, which might end up being a problem or it might be okay. Still too soon to say.

Six scenes in four days

That’s the goal. I have a story outline with six scenes, and I want it to be a complete draft by the end of the day on Sunday, which gives me 4 days (not including today). I’ll be shooting for a total wordcount of 5,000 words (which is the max length for the market I have in mind for this story). I suspect I’ll end up a bit over that, but I can trim later if need be.

Word quotas have worked well for me in the past, so I’ll try it again. Minimum output of 1.5k per day, starting …

Noise, Productivity, and a Story that Wants to be a Novel

There is an inverse relationship between ambient noise and my level of productivity. As noise increases, my productivity goes down. My apartment building is under construction. They are replacing the roof. Or dropping elephants onto it. Hard to say for sure, based on the noise.

*wanders off to find noise-cancelling headphones*

In other news, I tried to start in on a short story today, and the silly thing thinks it wants to be a novel. This is a new problem for me. Until recently, I tended to write everything pretty short (stories averaging 3k). Now I’ve developed more of an …

Hugo House Workshop – Terry Bisson

Got to spend the day on Sunday learning about short fiction from Terry Bisson as part of the Hugo House series of one day workshops (http://www.nwmediaarts.com/2007Event-Workshops.html). About a month ago I went to one of the other workshops in this series, where I learned about ‘middles’ from Connie Willis. Therefore, I was pleased when Terry announced that we would be learning about ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings.’ So in theory, I should be able to write a complete story now :) We also spent a lot of time on how to convey information using dialogue, which I found very helpful.

Some tidbits:

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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 …

Productivity Resumes

So I had an idea that was rattling around in my head for a while, and I kept trying to mash it with other things, which wasn’t working very well. So instead of doing that I tried to boil the idea down to its very essence and write it as flash, which seemed to work. Flash is not really one of my strengths, so it will be interesting to see what other people think of it. Anyway, it was nice to get some actual writing done, as lately I’ve been doing photography and outlining, both of which are at least …

Workshop Tidbits

Went to a writing workshop with Connie Willis, part of the Hugo House series of one day workshops (http://www.nwmediaarts.com/2007Event-Workshops.html). Connie was wonderful, with lots of insights on plot. She gave TONS of examples from books and movies, which I always find helpful. And, in addition to all the tidbits I picked up from Connie, it was nice to spend the day with a bunch of other writers, talking about writing.

Assorted tidbits from Connie Willis:

Plot reversals change the direction of the story. The questions that the reader is interested in change. A reversal can come about by finding out …

Miscellaneous Stuff

Over the last week or so:
Submission #23 – to Strange Horizons
Rejection #18 – an 8-day “nice writing” but “no grab” from F&SF

After several days of not writing, I outlined a story today. It’s not ready to be written yet, it’s close, but it needs to be mashed with *something.* I’m hoping that it will become clear to me what that something is by Monday, so that I can devote next week to writing the story. On the other hand, it may be that I’ll have a whole bunch of shiny new ideas by then, since …

WIP complete

Finished my story-of-the-week this morning. It came in at 5800 words, which for me is on the longish side of things. Sent it to my online crit group almost immediately, so now it’s out of my hands and I’m going to try not to think about it until a few weeks from now when the crits start rolling in.

Tag: writing