Category: Works in Progress

I turned in the rewrites on Exile yesterday. And Apocalypse Ink has the novella listed as Forthcoming on their website, along with the cover image. The cover image is kinda shiny: I’m behind on getting this back to the folks at A.I., for a variety of reasons. Partially it’s ’cause I overestimated how much I can do while moving into a new house; partially it’s ’cause I’m a numpty who struggles to get his shit together; partially, it’s cause… Well, it’s because everything I know about writing is wrong at the moment. I look at a task – writing a new draft; going through editors notes; writing a blog post – and my instincts tell me well, it’ll take about this long to complete. So I allot that kind of time to the task, and discover that it actually takes much, much longer than I think. For example, I gave myself five days to process the Exile rewrite. This seemed reasonable, given that it’s how long

Back in January I sat down and wrote a plan. That plan, more or less, said this is the year when you write all of the things. Then I made myself a list, which broken down what all the things were in roughly the order I wanted to write them. It was an ambitious-as-hell list of stuff. Full of hope and shiny, happy unicorn spit, pristine in its gleaming awesomeness.Full of novellas, weirdly enough, ‘cause that’s the way my year was rolling. I had a bunch of novellas that were due, for various reasons, so I figured I’d go with the flow. Now we’re into April and the list of all the things has been beaten around a little, the schedule thrown off track by computer problems and work problems and that whole moving-into-a-new-house thing. That’s okay. I expected things to fall apart. In fact, I even built in time where I’d use the beginning of April to regroup and

Sometimes, when you bitch about your deadlines on twitter, you’re just an asshole bitching about your deadlines. And sometimes, people will give you a new catchphrase, ’cause everything is better with some input from a mental organism designed only for killing:   In other news, I’ve got seventeen days or so to get a workable draft of Exile ready to submit to Apocalypse Ink, and it’s still not ready, so i’d bet get back to things.

Allow me to sum up my day in a single image: Me and coffee, we’re going to get real close today. Real, real close. I’ve hit the downhill slope on the latest writing project. Six thousand words to go, all of which is last act stuff where I’m tying off loose ends and resolving bits of conflict. In some ways, this is the easy stuff. I don’t have to make up anything new, I just have to follow the clues littered through the draft and write the things that logically fit into the story. On the other hand, it leaves me with this nagging feeling that I’ve got a job that’s almost finished, but not quite done. I’m not good with that feeling. As soon as I have one of those open loops, mentally speaking, my subconscious will spend some quality time finding some others when I should be sleeping and my old friend insomnia comes galloping over the hill

I submitted a bunch of stories earlier this week. And when I say a bunch, I’ve now sent out more stories in the space of 48 hours than I have in the past two years. I’ve rebuilt my submission list; I know where everything’s going if the stories get knocked back. I’m embracing the mantra of the twelve-hour turn-around when an editor says no, getting it out to the next market as soon as it’s feasible to do so. I remember how this goes now: write, submit, keep submitting. And, really, the most important bit: be willing to let people see you suck. My failure to submit wasn’t because I didn’t write stories, it was ’cause I kept putting off redrafting and developing the stories I had. There were notes and ideas and a whole bunch of things I kept meaning to do, but I never got around to do them. I was chasing the idea of the perfect story,