Thursday, June 30, 2011
Writers of the Future
Just got notice that I've received an Honorable Mention for my story In Black Mourn I in the second quarter of this year's Writer's of the Future contest. This was my first time to enter the contest, which is perhaps the largest in the genre, so I am happy to start off on such a good note. I plan to continue to enter each quarter until I either win, or get enough pro sales that I no longer am eligible for the contest.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
200,000 Words
Just logged in my daily word count on the spreadsheet I use to keep track of such things, and saw that I had hit the milestone of 200,000 words for the year. It seemed like such an auspicious moment I thought I’d better commemorate it with a quick blog entry. As you may know, I’m two weeks into the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and the workload is such that there’s not much time for blogging, or anything else but writing and critiquing classmates' work.
It’s been quite an amazing experience, though. I find I’ve been working from about six a.m. until about eleven at night, but it’s been quite rewarding. I’ve been cranking out about 12,000 words a week, so just under double my usual weekly output. I’m also learning a lot through the lectures and the critiquing process. I feel like I’ve learned so much new stuff about writing that its like using a sling shot my whole life, and now I’ve suddenly been given a machine gun. But of course all this new found knowledge means I’ve got to change the way I’ve been doing some things in the past.
Anyway, that’s about all the update I’ve got time for now. Back to work!
Chris
It’s been quite an amazing experience, though. I find I’ve been working from about six a.m. until about eleven at night, but it’s been quite rewarding. I’ve been cranking out about 12,000 words a week, so just under double my usual weekly output. I’m also learning a lot through the lectures and the critiquing process. I feel like I’ve learned so much new stuff about writing that its like using a sling shot my whole life, and now I’ve suddenly been given a machine gun. But of course all this new found knowledge means I’ve got to change the way I’ve been doing some things in the past.
Anyway, that’s about all the update I’ve got time for now. Back to work!
Chris
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Odyssey
I've made it! I'm here in lovely New Hampshire in the midst of the workshop. And there's as much work load as was rumored, so it looks like I won't have much time for blogging until I get back. So I'll just make a nice update of the whole experience then. For now,
Write on!
Chris
Write on!
Chris
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Sale - Every Day Fiction
Just got word I’ve had another sale, this time for the story "Lessons Never Learned" to Every Day Fiction. EDF is a great market that is similar to Daily Science Fiction in that they publish first via email to subscribers and then archive on a website. I like this method very much, and I subscribe to both EDF and DSF. I enjoy the quick read of a flash fiction or short fiction piece each morning to start my day off. It’s fun, and a great way to get into the writing mind set early in the day.
There was one change the editors requested, and it made sense to me. I didn’t provide clues to identify the gender of the narrator until late in the story, and this was disquieting for many of the first readers at EDF. Once they pointed it out, making the change made perfect sense. This is one of those problems when you, as the author, proofread your own story. Since I, as the author, knew the narrator to be male, the confusion didn’t stand out to me. But as soon as someone mentioned it, the confusing stood out prominently. Correcting this little bit of confusion serves to illustrate the importance of the writer and editor working together to make a better story, so I thought I’d take time to mention it.
Also, speaking of "you;" this story is epistolary in nature, i.e. the male narrator is addressing his deceased wife. (The gender of the spouse was not revealed until late in the story as well. I’ve fixed this now in the second sentence.) I would have to say an epistolary story is about as close as I will ever come to writing in the second person. A true second person story, where the author addresses the reader as if the reader is doing the action of the story, always sort of puts me off, and seems a bit smug on the author’s part. Epistolary stories, i.e. those written as a letter, don’t bother me in that way, because in the case of these, the ‘you’ is just another character in the story, and not the reader. It is as if we are privy to someone’s private communiqué with another character. In my story there is no letter, but the first person narrator (and not the author) is definitely addressing his deceased wife, (and not the reader) so it is still epistolary in nature–sort of like a mental journal entry on the narrator’s part.
I mentioned this story in a previous entry on music and writing. It’s title comes from the Walt Wilkins song of the same name. I think I will go put the album on the iPod this morning as a way of celebrating, and to perhaps see if there are any other story prompts in there.
Chris
There was one change the editors requested, and it made sense to me. I didn’t provide clues to identify the gender of the narrator until late in the story, and this was disquieting for many of the first readers at EDF. Once they pointed it out, making the change made perfect sense. This is one of those problems when you, as the author, proofread your own story. Since I, as the author, knew the narrator to be male, the confusion didn’t stand out to me. But as soon as someone mentioned it, the confusing stood out prominently. Correcting this little bit of confusion serves to illustrate the importance of the writer and editor working together to make a better story, so I thought I’d take time to mention it.
Also, speaking of "you;" this story is epistolary in nature, i.e. the male narrator is addressing his deceased wife. (The gender of the spouse was not revealed until late in the story as well. I’ve fixed this now in the second sentence.) I would have to say an epistolary story is about as close as I will ever come to writing in the second person. A true second person story, where the author addresses the reader as if the reader is doing the action of the story, always sort of puts me off, and seems a bit smug on the author’s part. Epistolary stories, i.e. those written as a letter, don’t bother me in that way, because in the case of these, the ‘you’ is just another character in the story, and not the reader. It is as if we are privy to someone’s private communiqué with another character. In my story there is no letter, but the first person narrator (and not the author) is definitely addressing his deceased wife, (and not the reader) so it is still epistolary in nature–sort of like a mental journal entry on the narrator’s part.
I mentioned this story in a previous entry on music and writing. It’s title comes from the Walt Wilkins song of the same name. I think I will go put the album on the iPod this morning as a way of celebrating, and to perhaps see if there are any other story prompts in there.
Chris
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Revisions
One of the aspects of Odyssey that I’m really looking forward to learning is how to revise. Some writers write a very rough rough draft, and then chisel and cut away, or mold and build up their story into a more polished final form. I tend to write in a manner that is summed up in a Stephen King quote (which I am paraphrasing from memory, so I don’t know how accurate it is) that writing is like digging up an artifact, and it is pretty much in its final form at the first digging, and any amount of messing with it afterward risks its destruction.
This is not to say that I don’t think that many of my stories still need work, it is just that they often feel very finished to me when I first write them. I still edit for spelling, usage and clarity, but I don’t really find myself changing the overall story all that much. I hope to change this behavior (at least I think I do) because I think there is much to be gained in the rewriting process.
I’m thinking of such things today because I just did a major rewrite on a story that I’ll be submitting at Odyssey, and while I think the story is stronger than it was before I started, I know it could be better. The story in question is one called Night of the Green Devil, and first of all I am proud that I was able to cut over twelve hundred words from the story, and not really change the gist of it all that much. There’s a saying that you can always cut ten percent out of a story, and this is probably almost always true. In the case of Green Devil, I was able to do it by eliminating one of the story’s most troubling aspects: The fact that over one third of it was told as a first person flashback.
I had submitted this story several times, and it had of course been rejected. The last rejection had a comment that said the first person flashback was lengthy and awkward. I had to agree–I always had felt it was, but the problem was, I really needed to start the story in the present, and then fill in back story from sixty years earlier. As the back story was events that happened to one of the characters, I simply had him tell it to the other character.
Fixing this felt really good, as it not only eliminated all those extra words that were necessary to have the two characters talking to one another, but it gave the back story section a bit more immediacy. I simply did it by making a break at the proper point, writing a header entitled "Sixty Years Earlier," and then continuing the tale in the third person. (Third person to me feels more story-like and proper, though I have written several stories in first person) When I finished the back story, I simply jumped back into the present time action. It seemed to work.
The only drawback is that I didn’t change the back story a great deal--other than substituting "he" for "I" and "Their" for "our," and so on--so much of the back story section feels like telling instead of showing. I’ll probably get dinged for this at Odyssey, but that’s okay for now. I’m looking forward to the critiquing process help me make this one a better tale, and for the moment, it is just under the word limit for Odyssey, so I didn’t want to add too much to it.
On another revision note, I got anther request for a revision on a story from a submission. This time just a few changes, which I made and resubmitted. The story is called The Night Bigfoot Attacked Marshall Texas, June 15, 1977. It is based on my own childhood, and is one of my favorites of my stories, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed on this one.
Chris
This is not to say that I don’t think that many of my stories still need work, it is just that they often feel very finished to me when I first write them. I still edit for spelling, usage and clarity, but I don’t really find myself changing the overall story all that much. I hope to change this behavior (at least I think I do) because I think there is much to be gained in the rewriting process.
I’m thinking of such things today because I just did a major rewrite on a story that I’ll be submitting at Odyssey, and while I think the story is stronger than it was before I started, I know it could be better. The story in question is one called Night of the Green Devil, and first of all I am proud that I was able to cut over twelve hundred words from the story, and not really change the gist of it all that much. There’s a saying that you can always cut ten percent out of a story, and this is probably almost always true. In the case of Green Devil, I was able to do it by eliminating one of the story’s most troubling aspects: The fact that over one third of it was told as a first person flashback.
I had submitted this story several times, and it had of course been rejected. The last rejection had a comment that said the first person flashback was lengthy and awkward. I had to agree–I always had felt it was, but the problem was, I really needed to start the story in the present, and then fill in back story from sixty years earlier. As the back story was events that happened to one of the characters, I simply had him tell it to the other character.
Fixing this felt really good, as it not only eliminated all those extra words that were necessary to have the two characters talking to one another, but it gave the back story section a bit more immediacy. I simply did it by making a break at the proper point, writing a header entitled "Sixty Years Earlier," and then continuing the tale in the third person. (Third person to me feels more story-like and proper, though I have written several stories in first person) When I finished the back story, I simply jumped back into the present time action. It seemed to work.
The only drawback is that I didn’t change the back story a great deal--other than substituting "he" for "I" and "Their" for "our," and so on--so much of the back story section feels like telling instead of showing. I’ll probably get dinged for this at Odyssey, but that’s okay for now. I’m looking forward to the critiquing process help me make this one a better tale, and for the moment, it is just under the word limit for Odyssey, so I didn’t want to add too much to it.
On another revision note, I got anther request for a revision on a story from a submission. This time just a few changes, which I made and resubmitted. The story is called The Night Bigfoot Attacked Marshall Texas, June 15, 1977. It is based on my own childhood, and is one of my favorites of my stories, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed on this one.
Chris
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