Archive for the ‘WIPs’ Category

7
Sep

Clarkesworld

   Posted by: Admin

Clarkesworld has some pretty fast turnaround times on story submissions.

Unfortunately, Bamboo Lessons got the form reject there too. However, I mainly sent it there just because of the fast turnaround since the next submission needs to be printed and mailed, and has a 2-3 month wait time.

25
Aug

Rejected Again

   Posted by: Admin

Bamboo Lessons was rejected again. This time by Intergalactic Medicine Show. Looks like it didn’t make it past the slush reader either.

The message: “Thank you for offering your story to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. After careful consideration, we’re sorry to tell you that we will not be using it; you are free to submit it elsewhere.”

So, no hints either on what was wrong or that they didn’t like. At least it was carefully considered – that is a definite plus 😉

Anyway, on to the next market (still trying to figure out who that will be).

29
Jul

First Rejection

   Posted by: Admin

My last post, I wrote about sending off my short story. Well, I just got a response back yesterday. It was a no.

But, the note was kind and didn’t totally tear down my dreams of fame and fortune.

It said:

Thanks for submitting your story to IGMS. It had some good qualities, but in the end I only have a limited number of slots and your story didn’t rise high enough to make the final cut.

Makes it sound like my story was at least considered. Of course, this is probably a form rejection, but it is still nice and positive.

The next step for this story is to put it up for my online writing group to critique. That should help me figure out where it is weakest.

I have no idea where else to send this, so I’ll have to do some more research on that too.

19
May

First Short Story Submission

   Posted by: Admin

Well, last night I sent off my first short story submission to Intergalactic Medicine Show. It is a bit frightening.

I originally created the story at Liberty Hall Writers as part of a flash fiction contest. I liked the story but haven’t done much with it for a couple years.

Then, I needed something for my Writing Group (The Point Writing Group, to be specific) and pulled it out, dusted it off, and totally revamped it. My writing group gave it a pretty good reception, with some much needed advice on how to improve the “surprise” for the end, and I rewrote it again. That was a couple months ago.

Then, yesterday, I pulled it out again and added in more world building-type detail to bring it even more to life.

I felt like I’d done all I could for this story and so I sent it out into the big bad world.

It will probably be rejected (it is my first submission after all), but the experience has been good for me.

26
Sep

Restarting tree.love

   Posted by: Admin Tags: , ,

After taking an unintentional break from this short story that I started at CoWW, I’ve come back to it within the past couple weeks (first, because it gave me something fun to do during class when I had the students doing peer reviews of each other’s papers; and second, because I keep telling myself to watch less TV (I don’t really watch much anyway) and get to writing).

In any case, I started by rereading the beginning, and editing as I went. I tightened up the prose by making it more immediate and action-y. I also decided to just do it from one point of view. I think two POVs is a bit of a stretch for this story. I liked the idea at the time, but the only reason was so I could get the reader in the head of the love interest so they’d fall in love with him too. I can do this by showing it from Liza’s (the protagonist) POV, just as well. The other reason I had done it is because I believe that you should tell the scene from the POV of the person in the most pain (or happiest, depending on mood being set) at that point. But, I think this works better for novels.

I didn’t have to throw away much, though, because it was easy to switch his POV over to Liza’s. Which is also how I really figured out that it would be OK.

It’s going to get a bit dicey towards the end of the story, but I’ll just have to have him tell her what happened.

16
Jul

How I Revised Transfer Loss

   Posted by: Admin Tags: , , ,

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Revision

Well, I got the story revised (a couple months ago :mrgreen: ), and I thought it would be useful to talk about how I did it.

But first, I think you need a little background on how I wrote it in the first place.

I wrote the story as part of Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp. This means that I had to come up with an idea, stew on it a bit, and write the story all pretty much within one day.

For ideas, Card had us go to a bookstore and look for something we would never write about and then get an idea, interview a person, and watch people doing something.

I got the idea for this story by watching some kids play on a fake tree-thing where they would crawl through from one side to the other. And, ZING, I thought wouldn’t it be cool if we could use trees to teleport from one location to the next?

Then, we had to figure out a beginning and ending for the story using Card’s MICE quotient (milieu, idea, character, event – read Characters and Viewpoint for more information). I decided this was more of an Event story, with some Character stuff as well. Therefore, that meant that I had to start the story where something was wrong and then end it where it got fixed (or accepted). I did just that, but then I thought I needed to add a bunch of stuff in about the guy’s relationship with his wife, and it got really weird (I had been reading Heinlein, that is my excuse).

Then, I spent most of the day I had goofing around, thinking about what I wanted to have happen in the story. I also spent way too much time creating a map with a cool Mapping program (AutoRealm) that I had recently installed. I guess that was my way of doing a bit of background research. When I actually got down to writing, I wrote the entire 38 pages (double-spaced) in about 4 hours.

Then, we workshopped the stories and I got lots of great feedback on it from all the other students and from Card.

So, when I went to revise, I reread all the comments from people (I had consolidated them all onto one copy of the draft), especially Card’s, and thought again about what I wanted to accomplish here.

Then, I basically started from scratch (I had the original draft in the new document, but I only used about 2 pages of it). I stripped off the first 4 pages and started where the event began to be known and worried about. I added in more characters and conflicts (3 disaster structure). And, I made the mechanism of transfer more consistent and rule-based.

Based on the comments I got back on this from Ellen Datlow and the other Codexians, I still have a lot of work to do, but I didn’t get the same kinds of comments I did the first time, so I feel like I’m making good progress on both the story and my skill as a writer.

2
Jun

Revising Boot Camp Story

   Posted by: Admin Tags: , ,

In May, I worked on updating and fixing (hopefully) the story I wrote at boot camp.

1
Nov

NaNoWriMo Has Started

   Posted by: Admin Tags: , ,

Well, today is November 1st, and that means that it is National Novel Writing Month. I officially started work on my novel today. I wrote one chapter and that came out to around 1900 words. So, not a bad start to the month.

I am using the general story and plot that I created for bootcamp of the Transfer Loss short story. But, I am not using anything as far as wording goes from it in writing this book. Just the ideas. I am not even going to open the document to look at it. I have my written notes and that is all I’m using. So, it will probably end up being a completely altered story from the “original”. But, I can’t see this as being a bad thing. Hopefully I can improved it.

And, since last year’s novel attempt didn’t turn out as expected, or even a coherent single novel (just a bunch of different thoughts and non-fiction stuff that I was going through), this will be my first true novel attempt. I am determined to finish it this year. And while it will probably stink, at least it will be my attempt at one story and at learning what my writing process really is.

I don’t know that I’ll blog every day during this month, but I will try to catch highlights and to explore things I learn about myself and such along the way.

Cheers!

10
Sep

Transfer Loss Updates

   Posted by: Admin Tags:

Just a couple days ago I started in on reworking Transfer Loss. I think the main problem with this piece is that I was never sure exactly where I wanted to go with it.

I need to go back to the 1000 ideas session and do it over again to get more non-cliche situations and plot.

I tried restarting it so that it was not in medias res, but I got stuck shortly after. Maybe I’m just to stuck on all the (great) comments the other boot campers gave me on it.