Read about specific works in progress: Those Ghosts of Time - Juvie project

Read about my past woes: Work-in-Progress Archive
 

	June 4	Since I started an external blog elsewhere, it looks like I won't be updating this page with the same caliber of stuff as before. I'll probably put notes here that carry over from the Tracker page, or I'll put down stuff that has to do with the website, maybe, but for the most part, this page will be bereft of my thoughts on my work in progress. Sorry. You can read lots and lots about my work in progress at the blog, though. I'm trying to update it every day or every other day. -----------
	May 23	I promised a couple of explanations on my Tracker page, so here they are. The Noon submissions. Like I talked about in my April 20 entry, I picked up a copy of Noon at B&N, and there was a lot of stuff in there that I didn't really understand or like. I knew that there were a few things that I had written that were similar, however...but I've had a hard time gauging whether these things are actually well-written. I think they're appropriate for the magazine, but I don't know if they're of sufficient quality, because I don't really understand quality in regard to this magazine. So that's why I had ? next to Probability. It's a puzzle. The Man Across the Hall. A couple of weeks ago I read a book of Raymond Carver short stories, and my brain was going "ohhhhh" the entire time. This is the reason why so much writing of today is baffling and difficult, because of this guy. He's a genius, and the spareness of his writing makes the obvious monsters that shift beneath the sentences all the more shadowed and dangerous. But this has been warped by far less talented writers into just doing spare, referential writing that refers to nothing and means nothing. Eggers is a pretty good example of this, except with a lot more precious flourishes. Man was my attempt to do a Carveresque situation, even if the writing falls short. (I didn't try very hard with the writing, I just omitted needless words like usual.) Carver stories usually involve a single situation which unfolds over a short period, and unless I'm doing something very descriptive (Loss and Gain, for instance), I rarely write that way. So this time I did. I don't know if the piece succeeds or not, but the pieces I read on the Hobart website seemed to resemble Man greatly, so I have high(ish) hopes. Jane's Diary. Very interesting things here. Okay, what happened was I wrote this piece of mini-porn, How It Is With Us, and I thought it was a pretty excellent piece of poetic smut. I submitted it to Aphrodite Unlaced, and the editor said she loved it but it was too short. She asked me if the piece could be a jumping-off point to something else (since I felt I couldn't extend the piece--I didn't think I had it in me). I thought up the idea of a diary, but one written by a different person than the woman who wrote How It Is With Us. I came up with a college girl who had been given the diary as a gift, with the smut already written inside, and how it helped her to discover her naughty self. The editor sent it back again, saying she really liked it but it wasn't right for her audience (which is mostly women over 35). I told her I needed some time to come up with a story aimed in that direction, and FINALLY yesterday I wrote one. It's about a 55-year-old who has never really enjoyed sex, and with Jane's help, her counselor's help, and her husband's help, she manages to have a little awakening. After writing this I realized that I was on my way to having an erotic novel in stories. If I write several more stories that refer to the How It Is passage, and put them together with a bogus explanation of how the diary got into so many different hands, it'll be gangbusters. I think. I suspect. I believe enough to be kind of excited. My ideas include office romance, extramarital stuff, possibly more fetish stuff, etc. Not bad, huh? No work on the stuff I need to work on, not for weeks. I'm so lazy. -----------
	May 16	Lots of emotional changes about the writing in the past month. This may be a long entry. First, I got really excited about the Glimmer Train contest, as should be obvious from the entries below. I was really very upset about it, especially since I didn't even get an email. I found out by checking the website and finding that my story said "completed". No further notification. Since it didn't say "completed" until the last week of the contest, I had presumed that I was pretty high up in the entries. If that was true, why didn't they email me? I'm lamenting over this. But most of what I'm lamenting over is my submissions. Please allow me to bitch and moan about them specifically. Ha ha, you have no say in the matter because I'M paying for the bandwidth! Still-out submissions: 1) Over There, to Confrontation; 2) Cemetery Ghouls, to Uptown Books; 3) Fear, to Cabinet Des Fees; 4) Luquenorse Folktales, to Mytholog; and 5) "Choking the Joystick", to Clean Sheets. All of these have been out for so long that Duotrope has red letters on them, telling me that it might be time to query. Well, I have queried. Three of the mags have not written me back, Mytholog just told me to be patient, and I didn't query Confrontation. This list does not include Bust, which has had my porn for 160 days (I queried them 70 days ago), Literal Latte, which has had an old and pretty bad version of Filial Love for 230 days (I've stopped caring about that one, and submitted a newer draft elsewhere), and a number of other places for whom no response or long waits are expected. I am extremely frustrated about this. The back of my mind worries that my email is listed as a spammer, and so no one is getting my queries or submissions, but I bet it's just the publishing life, dammit. This is so annoying. Rejected submissions: Point of Weakness. I am so tired of worrying over this story. Every rejection, and every reader, has suggested something different to change in order to make it better. Every single person has something different to say about it. This makes me think that I should just leave it the way it is, and hope for someone to like it the same way I do. Either that, or I never should have written the damn thing. I'm sick of it. If anyone wants to read it and talk it over with me, please contact me, okay? I'm at the end of my rope here. Love or Money. Lunch Hour Stories rejected it because they said it read more like a novel and the storyline was pretty basic. I agree with the second sentiment, totally don't understand the first. I know that novel writing is different from short story writing, but isn't it the pace, the number of words, the depth of action, the character development that makes the difference? All of those things are shortened for Love or Money, and it's a well-written story besides. I dunno. The biggest problem I'm finding is that it's basically mainstream fiction, and most litmags don't print mainstream fiction. They print edgy or trendy or literary fiction. Where are the mainstream fiction mags? The ones that'd print Nora Roberts' short stories? So now I'm getting even more frustrated and discouraged about my work. I could really use a good acceptance to perk me up. I haven't actually written anything in a couple of weeks, even though Aphrodite Unlaced is waiting for another draft from me. I'm blocked there, because I think I know what to write but I'm afraid it'll come out hokey and wrong. I have ideas sitting around waiting for me to write them, but I want to finish some of the old projects before I start on new ones: Ghosts, e-o-h (God help me on that one), maybe a few thousand more words on Chill. I decided to send a sample from The Weight of Ice to the guy who's running the writer's conference I'm attending in June. I have lots of questions for how I'm setting up and putting together that novel, and the writing's good enough (I think) that I won't be embarrassed for him to read it. (If I sent him stuff that I'm really proud of, I won't learn anything; if I sent him In Her Place, I couldn't look him in the eye.) This is the first time I've been majorly discouraged about my writing, and it's tough going. Plus I have the first issue of 10X10X10 to put together, and while I thought I'd look forward to this when it was finally completed, now it feels like a chore. Who's the patron saint of whiny, discouraged writers? -----------
	April 24	I've made up my mind about something. When I exhaust my current list of possible publications to submit to, I'm going to quit submitting to mags and start hunting around for an agent. Getting that rejection for Falling Leaves (ow, ow) was actually sort of a good thing in this regard. If I get an agent, s/he can start fresh, without any silly wait for a rejection to come back from a publisher. Maybe I'm just tired of rejection. (The count is somewhere around 50.) Either way. I'm still going nuts over the Glimmer Train contest. -----------
	April 20	Hooray! I finished my end-of-humanity story! (STILL no title.) "Finished" is sort of a relative term, however. I wrote all of the events, from beginning to end, but I left one chapter unfinished and I know I have a lot of work to do yet on it. Also, it's slightly under 18K, which is the bottom "preferred" limit for the INFRADEAD anthology. I wrote them an email some weeks ago to ask whether "preferred" means that they will accept work that's shorter than 18K, but I never got an answer. I'm going to write a shorter letter today asking them again. I've also been doing some good work on Those Ghosts, and there's more info about that in its own blog. (Or there will be sooner or later.) And my mother gave me a terrific idea that has revitalized my entire outlook on Deaf Boy. It will take some serious shucking and jiving to pull it off, and I'll have to concentrate on nothing else for months, probably, but if I can do it I'll have a very high-quality work as a result. I also found a stupid and obvious mistake in the Marilyn story after I sent it off. I numbered the hotel rooms in the Plaza with 42-- numbers, and the Plaza only has 18 floors. Also I called the streets "tiny" when Stuart's looking out the window at them, and streets wouldn't be tiny from only 18 floors. I'll correct it to say "Hilton" instead of "Plaza" but I sent off the story that way, so I'm quite upset. I can't decide if this mistake would make a difference to any given editor (who's not from NYC), but if it does, I'll be kicking myself for years.  I picked up a couple of litmags at B&N last weekend. One of them was Noon, an annual mag, and reading it helped me to understand why editors always request that you read a copy of their publication before submitting. <rant> I find this an absurd request, because if I bought a copy of every publication I wanted to submit to, I would be penniless in a month. I understand why they want you to, but it's a pretty terrible thing to insist upon, which some editors do. </rant> But I do see why after reading this mag. Noon is pretty high-quality, but my best work (Gone to Earth, for instance) wouldn't fit in there at all. I think I'm going to send them Things I Will Wish and possibly The Bargain. Most of the work in the mag was exceptionally esoteric, and that was just annoying. One piece was plain amateurish, and I was baffled at what it was doing there. Anyway. I'm going to let e-o-h rest for a while, but I do have a lot to do on Those Ghosts. My plan is finish it and Chill before I do any work on Deaf Boy, because Deaf Boy will be a Serious Project. I'm not sure when I should work on Weight of Ice, because the more I worry about the end (as of this writing I have no idea how the story ends, and this is most upsetting) the more I freeze up at where I am. Get it? Freeze up? -----------
	April 11	Life is no fun right now. Lots of my stories have been out to their markets for far longer than the markets said they would be, and I hate re-querying. I haven't written anything new in a couple of weeks, and I don't know how to get started again. My at-work writing situation might be vanishing soon, and I don't want to iron out an at-home schedule because my at-home time is so precious. The class that I thought I'd be able to take starting in mid-April got cancelled. I'm so nervous about the stories that are currently out to markets that I'm making myself ill. Etc. I sent the Marilyn story out to the Post. I'm so anxious about that. The rejection from Tin House for Gone to Earth hurt like hell, because I knew they were exclusive but the story is so gooooood. This weekend I'm going to enter it in a contest with Orchid. Also, I entered the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction contest back in November. The results are going to be posted May 1. I still haven't gotten a rejection letter about my story, which means that it's still in the running, a mere 19 days from the announcement. I'm dying over this, DYING.  I have a couple of ideas for what I'm going to do in the next few months. One thing is, I want to submit a query to Scrybe Press for a chapbook of three short stories: The Editor, The Heart of the Matter, and Point of Weakness. I'd love for all three of these stories to be published when I query, but if only Editor and Heart are, that's OK. But I have to wait until Heart and Point have gone through the most recent round of rejections, and until I've determined that the markets for those two are less viable than the Scrybe possibility. I'm also probably going to submit a query to BOA Editions (when they open again for fiction) for a short story collection, with a list of stories I haven't entirely decided upon yet. It depends on whether I get In Her Place in shape for publication (doubtful), what happens with SHE (more in a moment), and whether genre fiction should go in there or not. I have very high hopes for Dorchester's response to Falling Leaves. I found out how much money V. C. Andrews pulls in every year, and I hope they have some idea of it too before they reject me... About SHE: For no good reason, I started to worry that my MS was somehow not received or in the running for the Elixir Chapbook Competition that I submitted it to in October, so I queried about it. The editor, in a brief but friendly way, said yes, all is well, you're in the running. The competition doesn't even close until 5/31, much less start evaluating, but they were still comforting words. I decided that if I don't win, I'm going to submit that novella to Future Tense Publishing, a teeny press that publishes gritty underground chapbooks. They might like it. In the midst of all this, where's the writing? Well, I don't know. I've got a couple of ideas floating (creepy daddy-daughter story, humor story about the devil), and I have a number of works that I want to make progress on: Winter's Chill, Those Ghosts of Time, end-of-humanity (still no title), and The Weight of Ice. I would give a great deal for a month off to work on these in the privacy of my home. I want to get Ghosts and e-o-h finished, clear those ideas out of my mind to make some space. It would be nice to be finished with Chill as well, but the Whitfields can idle at the curb forever without burning any gas. I'm still determined to write a book about Columbine, but I think that'll have to wait until next year. I have banged out two solid opinion essays in the last week, but it's not the same.  Sorry I had so much to say. I'm still thinking about starting a real live blog on Blogger, but I don't know if it's a good idea. What do you think, Idle Reader? -----------

return home