Realized and Unrealized

I've been quiet. I apologize for the silence. It was the sort of silence that occurs when you take a breath and hold it.

I feel like I've been holding my breath. Waiting to exhale, as it were.

I've finally heard back from all but a couple of my previous batch of short story submissions, and none of the news has been good. I had my one lucky break, and now I starting to feel very far away from my dreams again.

I'll keep at it, of course. Even as I fought with myself whether to send the same stories back out or not, I researched markets and sent them today. I keep plugging away, expecting rejections and not acceptances now.

I've lowered my sights a little bit, too. Instead of choosing by highest paying market, I'm aiming for exposure instead, so I'm targeting markets with higher acceptance rates. Smart or stupid business practice, I don't really know, but honestly I just want my stories out there. The money (at this point) doesn't matter.

Someday, of course, I'd love to support myself solely on writing. But I'm not dedicated enough to the craft yet. I'm still learning. I'm still feeling my way through the process. I still need to learn how to edit longer manuscripts.

This past year has been a lot of trial and error and revamping of my writing goals. I've written at least one flash fiction story every month over the past year. I've learned how to edit shorter works. I've learned how the submission process works. I'm also figuring out what I want.

So while I'm falling short of a lot of my goals this year, I realize that it's because they were unrealistic. Or uneducated. Not because I'm not capable.

I won't give up. Not again. That's one of my goals for the up and coming year: no quitting. But I have accepted that there will be slumps. And that I might feel like quitting sometimes.

Looking forward, I probably won't be submitting anything else for awhile after this current round I just sent out: it's time to focus on National Novel Writing Month and try remember how to write novels. I've been a short story writer this year, and while I'm nervous to put my noveling pants back on, I think it's time.

I just hope flash fiction hasn't ruined my ability to tell a story in more than 1000 words!

A Super Long Shot

I am behind.

I suppose as a writer whose full time job is not being a writer, that happens sometimes. The reason I'm worried about it is because I'm behind on an assignment for the Confabulator Cafe. Other people are counting on me there, so it's not my own success that's on the line.

But I have no plans tonight, so I will buckle down and get it finished.

It's a story for flash fiction week next week, and the reason it's late, aside from the fact that I just haven't worked on it, is because I really like it. It's like, one of my favorite things I've started writing all year, and it has so much potential to be awesome, that I'm thinking about it too much. I need to just drink a glass of wine, let go, and finish writing it. There are major changes I'd like to make some day, but I can clean it up and edit it for submission later on down the line.

I need to finish what I started first.

In other news, I took a huge gamble today. Well, truly it wasn't a gamble at all, because I don't have anything to lose, really. I submitted a story that I wrote almost ten years ago and have spent at least once a year every year in that amount of time polishing it. It has been sitting there on my hard-drive all that time, wanting to be told, and I had resigned it to something I might someday self publish.

Instead, I decided to clean it up one more time - polish it within an inch of its life - and submit it to Tor.com.

See? Insane crazy long shot. They receive hundreds upon hundreds (maybe even thousands) of submissions a year, and I'm not confident this story is good enough to be part of the Tor catalog, even if it's only an online short story version of Tor. It's still freaking Tor.

Tor. One of the big names in sci-fi and fantasy.

I decided, though, that it was better in their hands than doing nothing on my computer. The only drawback is that now I have to wait around eight months or more to receive the likely rejection.

That's ok, though. I have lots of other projects to keep me occupied while I wait.

Wish me luck. Check back in about a year to see whatever came of it!

http://www.tor.com/

Slumps and Success

I go through cycles with blog posts where I get really motivated and get ahead, knocking out posts for weeks in advance, to the extreme opposite of not being able to blog even if my life depended on it.

The same goes for writing.

I'm in a bit of a slump right now. I'm having trouble writing, and I'm unhappy with the stuff I've been coming up with. I've realized it's all part of the process, but it's frustrating, none the less. I wish I could be creatively inspired all the time. But luckily I have things like this blog and my writing group that keep me writing even when I don't want to.

The more my writing group makes me write, the more material I have to submit. I still try to submit every couple of weeks. I haven't been writing anything in addition to my Confabulator Cafe flash fiction stories, but I've been cleaning up old flash assignments and sending them in.

And now for my exciting news! One of those flash fiction stories that I cleaned up and submitted has been accepted for publication. I don't have many details yet, but it will appear in this publication's first anthology. I've signed the contract and they will be paying me a quarter of a cent per word. Just a token payment, not nearly professional yet, but I'm so excited that one of my stories is going to be published. I did it!!

I've been comparing story submission to gambling addiction, and I just hit a jackpot. A small one, but just enough to keep me gambling. I need to keep writing and keep submitting.

Once I know more about the anthology, I'll let you know!

Finally Getting To It

Does loving school make me a nerd? (photo)

This as been an incredibly exciting week for me.

After months of stagnation, where I didn't even update my blogs let alone write anything, things are finally moving again. I feel like I am back to making progress towards some of my goals.

First - I am officially enrolled in an online grammar and mechanics for editors class at UC Berkeley. If all goes well, I will earn their Professional Sequence in Editing certificate over the next four semesters. The program starts in September, and while I am extremely nervous and a bit trepidatious about my ability to do school after sitting out for so long, I am also so excited that I have already purchased my textbooks.

Second - I found out today that one of the stories I submitted to a publication has made it through their first round of cuts. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm in - they had over 200 submissions and they can only take about 15 stories - but that means it was good enough for them to give it a second look. I actually assumed it was a rejection when I first saw it, and I had to read it twice to realize it wasn't!

Third - This may be a bit premature, and I reserve the right to revoke ever mentioning this, but I think I might be ready to start editing my novel, Online Dating for Demons. I've been thinking a lot about the world lately and how much the inconsistencies are bothering me to the point where I really want to fix them. I did some preliminary note-taking on changes I need to make, and I am about to start following R.L. Naquin's index card method. I haven't ever significantly edited anything this long before, so I have no process to speak of. Which means I will be stealing hers to start with.

That's it for now, but I think that's plenty. I'm excited. I'm feeling good about writing and editing. I'm daring to hope that my dreams may someday become a reality if I keep working at it.

The only discouraging part is trying to be patient. I wish I could just put on a good song, montage through all of the hard parts, and then when the song is over, I'd be a wildly successful writer and editor.

Camp got Rained Out

Image borrowed from here

So my attempt at Camp NaNoWriMo this year was a complete wash. I wrote less than three-thousand words, which is way shy of even the thirty-thousand I had lowered my goal to halfway through June.

June was not a good month to write a novel.

I'm trying not to let that bother me too much. I did get a lot of brainstorming for the idea done, and the first scene is written. The foundation is there.

I think the biggest problem I ran into wasn't so much that I didn't want to write, I just never made time and when I did I wasn't highly motivated. I like my idea. But the foundation isn't solid. It's a sequel to Monsters of Lawrence, and Monsters of Lawrence is still barely a Zero Draft, so it was tough to keep writing in a world where I still need to fix a few flaws and figure out what actually happened and what is going to be cut out and therefore never happened.

Anyway, my main concern with not getting very far last month is that it was my second Office of Letters and Light sponsored event that I totally bombed. Anyone remember Script Frenzy? I wrote one whole sentence for that before I quit.

I failed Script Frenzy, failed Camp NaNo, so I can't help but feel a bit of concern for this November. Will I be able to write a fifty-thousand word novel later this year, what with all the writing interruptus I've experienced so far?

I do not, however, consider the month of June a waste. Not in the slightest. In fact, as I mentioned couple of weeks ago, I hit a major milestone. My first submission! It was something I always feared, and now that I have done it, I am actually kind of addicted to it.

I even got my first rejection today, and instead of crushing me, I just frowned, shrugged, and then found another publication to submit it to. I know it's a good story. I just have to find the right market.

I'm no longer a submission virgin. I know I've been a writer this whole time, but somehow, this makes me feel like a really real writer now.

A New Addiction

Photo borrowed from here

I did it! I finally did it!!

I submitted my first story to be considered for a publication.

I've been meaning to do this since January and I've been dragging my feet, but I finally got myself together, did some market research using the brilliant website Duotrope and found an anthology that I thought was a good match for one of my short stories.

And it felt so good to finally submit something, that I did a bit more digging yesterday, and submitted another short story to a different publication yesterday afternoon.

I think I might be a little bit addicted to submission now. It's terrifying and exhilarating and I know there is a good chance of rejection, but a little hope is definitely dangerous. Right now I'm riding on a high, although I'm trying to not get my hopes up too much. Part of submission is rejection, so I am attempting to steel myself for the worst.

The thing is, though, is that I am stubborn. If someone thinks I can't do something, I dig in my feet and throw myself into proving them wrong. So maybe, just maybe, a rejection won't completely crush me. It might just empower me.

Throughout this process, I have made a couple of decisions.

The first is that I need to keep writing more short stories. That's where my head is these days and that's where I'm having the best results. The Confabulator Cafe has done wonders for my ability to tell a story in a short space. I would like to try to write a short story on my own in addition to the Cafe's flash fiction assignment every month. Mostly because a lot of places won't consider work that's already been published, and some presses consider sharing a story on your website publishing.

The second decision I made is that along with writing a short story a month, I must submit at least one short story a month. Since most publications take at minimum two to three months to let you know if your submission has been accepted, if I submit a story a month, in three months I should start hearing back every month.

I'm impatient and like immediate results. I need to use writing and submission as a distraction so I don't become overwhelmed and obsessed waiting for results.

I will let you all know the results as soon as I receive them! Good or bad. I might need help dusting off my pride if/when I get rejected.