Submissions Outs

It's time for another of the many periodic updates of writing in my neck of the woods. There's been a few ups and downs since my last entry, and I hope to cover them all without sounding like I'm bragging or whining, a difficult feat. I just hope I don't forget to cover something important.

First off, in regards to The Fall of Order, I've managed to squeeze out a measely 2044 words since my last update. So much stuff has been going on in the real world that I've been struggling to bring myself to edit this piece. Still going to crank away at it. I actually have two hours tonight set aside to work on this project. I'm hoping to get past the roommate's story and move into a nice little betrayal scene. Should be fun stuff. Wish me luck.

For my NaNo novel, I've come up with a sort of "Epiphany Summary" and drawn the main ideas out of the main group of character's epiphanies. These will be something of a guide for the novel. If a scene doesn't somehow move one of the character's closer to their epiphany, or have them get blocked in trying to reach that goal, then the scene should have no place in the book. I then scribbled down a list of some 32 scenes, 11 locations, and 9 research topics I'm going to have to dig into. I took a bit of time the other day to do some research at The Townhouse. Since one of the characters comes from the big city, I was thinking of making her a bit of a metal-head. Went out to a Wolven Ancestry concert and scribbled notes while I pretended to drink. Not sure if I'll use those notes in this story, but it's still useful research. Floated the story synopsis by a few writers and got some nods and "neats." Not overly useful criticism, but I can trust them to tell me "It's not my kind of thing" if it's a shitty idea, so I think I'm safe.

I've also begun work on a couple of pieces of flash fiction. One story, entitled "Bloodspurt" managed 485 words in the skeletal draft. The other piece I've barely touched on and sits around 118 words so far. I hope to clean up "Bloodspurt" and have it ready for submission by late-September. The second piece, I hope to have cleaned up and ready for submission by the end of October. That should leave me free to work on NaNo during November. I also have two short articles of approximately 150 words taking opposite sides on the Death Penalty debate that I may be able to put aside for a piece some point in the future.

Yesterday I sent four poems (Arrogance, Tinted Mirror, Invisible Eris, and Two Days) to poetry magazine. They have an 8-week response time, so by October 5th, 2009, I should know whether or not they'll be picking up any of my work. I have hope for two of the four poems that I sent. The other two, well, I had been told they were worthwile a couple years ago but never made use of them. I don't feel as good about them as the people that told me to send them, but we'll just have to wait and see. According to the site, they pay $10/line, minimum $300 (though the Writer's Market says min $150). If all were accepted, I'd be looking at a $760 US cheque. That's nice to think about, but I'm not going to count on anything. Just going to keep scribbling some poetry and see if it takes me anywhere.

On the writing group and arts Sudbury side of things, there's been something of a cataclysm. The Sudbury Hypergraphic Society has split between those who beleive the point of the group is to write, and those who beleive the point of the group is to promote arts activities and their own work locally as a non-profit organization. I had always thought the purpose of the group was to inflict hypergraphia (a neurological disorder whereby one is unable to stop writing) upon ourselves, and thus fell firmly in the first camp. It's sad to see something that I helped form rip itself apart, but many of us have seen it coming for a couple months but had been hoping that it would blow over. It hasn't and thus a split has become necessary. Unfortunately, that means I have two red shirts with the SHS ironed across them that I now need to toss at Value Village.

On the bright side, the new writing-side of the group has agreed to meet weekly instead of bi-weekly. We will be writing and critiquing. That is our goal, our purpose, and our endeavour. We will see ourselves published when we are ready, and we will support each other in our writing endeavours. The "Underground Writers" as our blog has been called for the past 26 days, will continue to carry on the spirit that many of us though the SHS was supposed to embody.

That pretty much brings everything up to date. Time to get to work on editing The Fall of Order. Stay tuned for future updates.

Word Count & Cheering Squad

Hello once again everyone.

I've been getting a fair bit of writing done over the last little while. Earlier today I cranked out a fresh scene for The Fall of Order. In my first draft, The Fall of Order had been written as a bunch of seemingly unrelated short stories about a necromancer. As I moved into the second draft, I decided that the stories were too unrelated to leave in that form. As a result, I've had a lot of work restaging while I edit.

When I sat down to get to work earlier this afternoon, I discovered that I had arrived at a point where the necessary scene had not been written. I had not written a short story involving the fate of John. As a result, I managed to crank out a pretty tightly written scene that not only revealed his fate, but also took a few steps into the past of the principal villain, revealing a part of her reason for doing what she's doing.

It ended up adding just a little over 1500 words to my novel. I'll be sitting down and editing the next scene sometime over the next hour or so. In its original incarnation, the next scene was written as a part of a writing challenge for the Sudbury Hypergraphic Society. It ran around 768 words. I figure, after editing it and weaving in the larger storyline, it'll probably end up around 1500.

A few other members of the SHS and myself got together last Thursday to figure out a way to keep motivation up for our writing. To push each other to continue to write, and to write more. One of the things we came up with was a word-count blog. As a result, Off-Week Write-Ins was born. Each of us will post our word counts daily, as well as any excuses for not having written, or thoughts about our progress. Generally the posts will be really short (ie: 726 words on The Fall of Order and 120 on "Rifters." Go me!). We also hope to meet on the off-week of the SHS meetings for mini-write-ins, just like we used to have during National Novel Writing Month. This will work much like the Monday Writing Pack that I attend, and have nothing to do with the SHS other than having a couple of same members.

The next Sudbury Hypergraphic Society meeting is this upcoming Friday. We'll probably discuss delaying the book sale until next year, and then move on to our writing or maybe some critiquing. Either way, it should be a good night with another nice word count.

Anyhow, time to get back to my writing. Wish me luck!