In First Gear

I outlined a new short story yesterday. I'm targeting Issue #3 of Emerald Tales. The outline stands at nearly 1500 words so getting it all in under the 4K mark may be difficult.

Then two things occurred yesterday to stop me from working last night.

First, I left my USB key at work. All of my work is on that little flash drive. I back it up to my work PC and to my home laptop, but I do all my work directly from it. Leaving it plugged into my work PC left me hanging. I couldn't work on editing anything and I couldn't send out Spoilt Rotten. I couldn't work on my new outline either.

Second, the first test of The Ashes series began last night. Most of you won't be interested, but I love cricket, and for others like me, this is the ultimate contest between traditional rivals which has been going on for 127 years. I'm guessing there isn't many other sporting rivalries anywhere in the world which have been going that long. Yes, test cricket can be boring, but for a passionate player of the sport, and a patriotic Aussie to boot, I can waste days watching it.

In the end, I checked my email a couple of times (which was very quiet), flicked through ME2 again, watched the cricket, and did no writing.

Tomorrow I have a day off from my normal job. Whatever I don't get done today (editing, finding a market, working on new outline) will be done tomorrow. I also need to continue my reading and finish a project with my youngest (can't really call her my little one anymore).

So far today I've written up the review of Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the first book in the Dexter Omnibus so I can move onto the second book with a clear conscience. Now - to find a market for SR.

**Update**

I can't do anything with Spoilt Rotten until I get home. I have a strange inclining that I sent it out and didn't update my spread sheet - need to check. It turned out that Digging Up The Past wasn't currently out at market either so I've found somewhere for that. At 6170 words, it's a slightly more difficult piece to find a home for.

If SR has gone out as I suspect, then all of my currently completed pieces are in the market place awaiting an editors stomp...er...stamp of approval.

My new piece is well outlined so it can wait a week or three before I do anything further on it (although chances are I'll play with it well before then - do shorts count as WIP Wednesday?) which leaves me with just reading.

And waiting....

Isn't this writing game just mega fun?

B

***Updating the update***

Spoilt Rotten had not been resubbed anywhere - it has now. I now have all of my current batch of short stories out in the wild. New goals for tomorrow:

To read the second book in the Dexter Omnibus and to read Issue 7 of NT.

And wait for those acceptances to roll in ;c)

Back to the cricket...

Never Rains But It Pours

I should have stayed in bed catching little electric Pokemon instead of opening my email today.

Spoilt Rotten has gathered its second rejection. Need to find another target market.

AHWA competition results have been released and neither of my entries did any good. Now I need to find new targets for Digging Up The Past and God's Piscatorial Church.

I got my piece for The New Bedlam Project back from Pharo and it needs work, although The Great One does believe the story can work which is encouraging. I just need to fix a couple of things.

I need to finish revising Arcanum and send it out.

I need to send pieces off to Necrotic Tissue. Does 1 short and 1 100 worder count as multiple subs for this market? Nat? Cate? Anyone?

And lastly, I've had another story idea, but this time while I was wide awake - actually while I was out shopping with the better half. Not sure about the length of this thing yet, but the themes buzzing around my head are screaming for a proper manuscript. More thinking to be done and then some outlining, or maybe the other way round - quite excited over this one - again! What happened to concentrating on shorts for a while?

And lastly, I need to get a $@#$ load of reading done - 6 novel-length books in 5 weeks! Where the hell am I going to find the time to read my lovely copy of Necrotic Tissue which finally arrived in my letterbox. Oh, and thanks goes out to Jodi Lee. My copy of her and her daughter's chapbook arrived safe and sound. It's beautifully presented (handmade even) and full of interesting facts and fun activities. Head on over to her site and have a look. Very cool.

Being crook has placed me firmly behind the eight ball - time to get back in the saddle and get some work done.

AHWA Competitions

Digging Up The Past and God's Piscatorial Church has gone.

Good luck to everyone who enters.

God's Piscatorial Church Is Open

'God's Piscatorial Church' is the title of my AHWA Flash Fiction Competition entry. I fought against this title for the best part of a week, but nothing else fits as well as this, so this is what it shall forever be known as.

It was inspired by the wall in this picture by Victoria Frances:



This is my current desktop wallpaper at work - yeah, everyone there pretty much knows I'm not normal.

If you haven't checked out Victoria's work, do yourself a favour. Simply brilliant.

As for the story, I am quite happy with how it's turned out.

To be on the safe side, I'm going to let it sit for a day or so and then read it again before I decide to send it in.

So today has been a good day. I even remembered to post off the completed assignment. Over the weekend I'll finish off Digging Up The Past and send that off, and hopefully find something I can use for the six page script I need to submit pretty soon. I also want to finish reading the current issue of Aurealis so I can move onto a novel. Oh, I also need to update the website which is woefully out of date.

If I can get all this done, or at least everything up to finding a six page script, by Sunday night, I'll be a happy camper.

Have a great weekend.

Revision

Today was a day full of agonising over a word or sentence, occasionally a paragraph.

The first draft of my 1000 word, untitled piece, hovered between 900 and 1015 words. I'd cut a bit, and then rewrite another bit and then contract two words, realise something should be hyphenated, scrap another bit and then expand another. I imagine it could be described very well as my piece was breathing, struggling to find the right rhythm it would need to survive in the real world. It's done. It's been sent to Pharo for grammar correction and premise/plot comments. It's different. We'll see.

I've also revised Digging Up The Past. This will be going out the door to a bunch of people shortly.

Unfortunately I didn't get around to polishing my assignment. I must do that tomorrow.

And that's it. That's all I did today in my writing endeavours. It took a long time to get my words in a place I was happy with, but it's done and time to move on. Assignment tomorrow and then back to AKL.

Back Into Normality

Back at work today. Nothing blew up in my absence and it did take me all morning to work through hundreds of emails after 12 days away. In the end, there were only a dozen or so of any note.

Unfortunately one of them was a rejection for 'Digging Up The Past', my sub for the Devil's Food Antho. Just a form pass so it'll take a quick revision and out she'll go again.

When I earlier said I didn't think I was being a good blog citizen, I was referring to my lack of reciprocating to those kind enough to visit and leave comments. My reading of others blogs has been a little stunted recently. I've even been slack in updating the blogs I frequent on my sidebar. I'm in the process of fixing that. You'll notice my blog rolls are extending quite a lot.

Now I'm back at work, I'll also be settling back into reading blogs first thing of a morning to catch up on current events and hopefully having something useful to add in way of a comment.

As I had mountains of email to trudge through this morning, and, shock horror, I had some work to do, I haven't gotten through all my feeds yet, but I thought I'd add whatever useful links I came across as I did.

From Janet Reid's excellent blog I found this quote from one Julie Weathers, "Query letters are like a good strip tease. Reveal enough to stir up the reader emotionally and leave them wanting more." - writing advise to live by. Brilliant! (And yes, I've added Julie to my blog roll - if someone can come up with writing advise like this, I want to read her daily thoughts).

A little while ago, during one of the meme things that were/are going around, I disclosed a funny and utterly stupid thing I did in the past in regards to the first manuscript I'd written. I won't rehash it her, but this post over at Et in arcedia, ego, agent Jennifer Jackson's blog, pretty much nails it. I have, on many, many, many occasions tried to push this point since I wised up and winced at my early behaviour. If you want to be a professional writer, you must act professionally. It is a given fact that we are all too close to our work to be able to give objective opinions on it. Writers never stop learning and growing in the use of the craft. Not all experimentation or plot twist will work as you envisage it. When you finish your work, let it sit before revising it - then send it to someone not related to you, and preferably living in a different suburb, if not a different state or country, to give their opinion on it. Revise some more - polish it till it shines. Remember, great writing is not written - it's rewritten. Then submit it to market as per the guidelines as stated on the target market/agents website.

Just about everyone haunts Nathan Bransford's blog now-a-days, but just in case you've been under a rock, down the coast, or just too busy (that would be me on all three accounts), Nathan has been hosting the Be An Agent for a Day series of posts. As soon as I find some time I intend to go through them and check out the queries, the responses, and Nathan's advise on them. I should be able to learn something from that lot...I hope.

And just for the hell of it - stop complaining about agents or the process. Just write. If you do this well enough, you'll find the right agent for you, but please, enough with the agent bashing I keep reading about around the place - it's not nice - and it doesn't help anyone. Feel free to vent on your own blog (god knows I do from time to time), but is there really a need to sound off on an agents blog? Besides, it's not professional and I have a sneaking suspicion agents have a long memory about such things...

Tweets - I don't get it. I know one or two of you out there partake of this particular phenomenon, but I don't get it. I sure as hell wouldn't be able to do it - look at the length of this post!

Found this post on Smoke & Mirrors, Shane Jiraiya Cummings blog. Yep, it was five days ago and I'm only now catching up. It gave me all nice and warm fuzzy feelings to see my name listed as a possible candidate for best fan writer - yeah, right! My vote goes to Chuck McKenzie. It'll be an interesting list when the nominations do come out. Any way - thanks for the mention Shane.

I also found out today the the Australian Tax Office considers writers as "Special Professionals" - as tax time is only a couple of months away, here could be some info you need to know. (Thanks to Speakeasy for the nod & reminder.)

Okay - that is more than enough for my first post back at work. There may be more tonight if I get around to doing some writing.

BT

Submissions

Today I decided to lay off Newland and clear the other projects I'm working on. Result:

Swirls In Obsidian has been submitted to PARSEC Science Fiction & Fantasy Short Story Contest 2009.

Digging Up The Past has been submitted to The Devil's Food Anthology.

Dreaming is being furiously worked on with the intent of submitting it ASAP to The Blackness Within Anthology. (Update - subs don't open till March so I'm just trying to finish it now. It can sit quietly in the back ground until the end of the week.)

I really like the first, I'm happy, but have doubts about the second, and I'm just not sure I can pull the last one together.

With these out of the way, I can concentrate solely on my assignments and Newland.

I currently have 8 pieces out in the wild for consideration. All are paying markets so competition will be high.

Out of the 8, I need to send queries to four of the publications. They are all approaching six months overdue the expected query response date. Two I've queried before and received a 'still under consideration' reply, but it's getting a little long in the tooth now.

Time to shake things up.

Not A Good Boy

Yesterday I worked on Digging Up The Past and dug up a new ending for it. Still not sure I'm happy with it so I'll let it sit for a while before going over it again. I also had a look at Dreaming. This story is starting to feel like wrestling semi-naked twenty-something-year-old women in Taffy--exciting but extremely difficult to move about it.

I have an idea for the story but I'm finding it difficult to shape it, to mold it into what I see in my head. The words don't seem to want to line up right. It is very frustrating. It has a lot to do with the time lapse between the inspiration and first writing of it, and now. Especially with all the confusion over versions. Well, today I have figuratively shaved down and I'm prepared to climb back into the giant Taffy bowl which is my imagination. If I'm not out in a few days, either send in a rescue team or simply lower your head for a minutes silence.

Last night I was ready to sit down and work on the Act One Climax of Newland. And then my wife called me in for the World Cup qualifier of Australia playing Japan. So no writing was managed. Tonight is training and selection down at the cricket club. This always turns into a late one so there'll be no writing tonight either.

I need to write 6250 words a week to reach my goal. I've written 230 this week. Maybe Dreaming will have to wait. Now that I'm all silky smooth and ready to swim, I think I'll hit Newland where it hurts.

It is nearly 9:00 here as I write this. Lets see how much on Newland I can get done before I have to leave to pick up my daughter at 3 this afternoon. That's 6 hours. I'm at work, but there's not a lot on so I should be able to get a bit done.

Time me starting...now!

2009 Truly Begins

Yesterday I worked some more on Digging Up The Past, my story slated for the Devil's Food Antho. Today I finished the first draft. She now sits at 5186 words. I'll let it sit for a while before revising.

Its not as if I don't suddenly have anything else to do.

You see, my course books arrived last night.

First Module off the rank is titled "Writing For Film & Television" - and surprisingly enough, the course book goes on and on about all the things I've been learning about over at Alexandra Sokoloff's blog (link in sidebar - I know, I'm lazy).

The biggest issue I have is the way the course coordinator wants a short script each fortnight. The first is to be only two pages long, the second 3, the next 5, and on we go till we get to assignment 8 where the script is to be up to 15 pages in length. Each one is to have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Formatting for scripts is somewhat different than my normal story writing. You can fit way less on the page, and detail of setting is to be kept to a minimum. How does one tell a complete story in a visual format in less than a few minutes? I know independent film makers just starting out tend to do it all the time, but they always seemed cliche or totally abstract when I watch them. Not sure I can do that. I'm going to give it a go by adapting some of my flash stories, starting with my piece titled Wake-Up Call. At least I don't have to think up the dialogue and the scene doesn't change. What's that saying about 'gently into the fray...'

While struggling with this module, I'll also be doing Write Fiction 2. I really enjoyed the lead up module to this one, and it is a requirement for me to move onto writing a novel next year (that would be polishing the current WIP I hope).

My battle with Mr Jonathon Stone continues in the second half of the year when I become an internal student. That will be interesting. To round off the year I get to examine contemporary Australia which will be in line with the current direction my writing is heading anyway - cool, hey! For more detailed information - go look here.

Anybody see how I'm attempting to manipulate things here so my writing works for my assignments which is working for my writing in an ever increasing circle? Hopefully folding my learning layer over layer (Sara Lee anyone) will result in a greater grasp of the craft leading to a breakout year next year (if not sooner - although the plan is still for 2012).

This brings to mind another great saying: The best laid plans of Mice and Men...

Last night I also received 4 new stories to slush. I've read one so far. I'm still yet to suggest accepting anything :c(

Currently outside we are experiencing temperatures in excess of 45C. I'm inside, at my day job, where the air conditioner is keeping things at a lovely 30C+ (Yep--it can't cope either).

Don't get me wrong, I prefer it to be hot than cold. The cold makes me ache, joints seize up, life is miserable. Heat equals movement, less pain, and females with less clothing on. How can any male prefer the cold?

Enough from me for today. I'll be heading over to my website to update a few things and to create the new pages for the 2009 academic year. Pop on over if you ever get a chance or want to check out my progress.

Adios for now.

BT

News

My writing has slowed down to a crawl but that's okay. I'm working on two short stories:

Dreaming: For the Apex anthology

Digging up the past: For the Devil's Food anthology

Last week I listed all the current anthologies within Duotrope and went through them one at a time. A couple sparked a minor creative thought but quickly petered out. The Apex anthology gave me an idea that grew and the Devil's Food anthology gave me an interesting idea which prompted a little bit of research, which led into a full blown idea.

I'm going to work slowly on both. We'll see how it goes.

Next: The preliminary ballot phase for The Stoker Awards has been announced. I'd like to congratulate Alexandra Sokoloff for being nominated in the "Superior Achievement in a Novel" category for "The Price" along with such mainstay notables as Stephen King, Jonathon Mayberry, and Brian Keene.

All AHWA members have just been mailed a member's badge to place on their websites and blogs. It has been created by the very talented David Schembri. David is also the Art Director for AHWA own magazine Midnight Echo. I purchased the first issue of the magazine in print so I can testify to David's genius. If you happen to be in the market for artwork for anything, do yourself a favour and contact David to discuss how he can bring your visions to life at rsc55468@bigpond.net.au.