Week 4 of 10 Weeks of 10 Stories

I took this at a Civil War fashion show a few years ago. The woman hand-made this costume herself.

Story #4′s idea started with a book on cats published in the 1920s.  There was a short blurb about a painting of a cat with eyes that followed you.  Those eyes supposedly drove the owners to commit suicide.  I tried to do it as a story, but I couldn’t figure out really how to resolve it.

So I put it back on the plate for the 10 Stories in 10 Weeks.  I was going to ignore the earlier attempts and start fresh.  I was in critique group, and one of the members mentioned a story that gave me a perfect idea for part of the execution.  Then it hit me: “Crap.  I’ll have to do research.”

A story in a week doesn’t allow much time for research, and this new bit would have required a lot of it.  Could I change it so I didn’t need to the research?  The story became steampunk, using a technology solution.

But it was still stubborn and didn’t come together.  My travel to Balticon, and then to Virginia Beach might not have helped … It was sort of like I had all these different pieces, but not the story itself.  I couldn’t figure out how to open it, and I wasn’t entirely happy just having a technology solution.

One of the problems was that I needed to establish the setting.  I got too focused on establishing the problem and not on the other parts  necessary to resolve it.  Once I got the setting into the story, it started to come together.  I did have to do some research, but only small stuff:

Women’s Fashion in the 1880s – I was looking for a picture I could describe, and I wanted something with a more unusual color.  In cons, the Steampunk costumes are usually brown and white and not the glorious colors the Victorian period is known for.

Historical Fashion – More pictures!  The blue dress is what inspired my female character’s clothes.

Women’s Hairstyles in the 1880s – I was glad I looked this up.  I was thinking a more severe hairstyle than the one described here.

By the way, the male main character is a war veteran, and disabled, and has post traumatic stress syndrome.

Now I have to figure out where to send it …

For more of 10 Weeks of 10 Stories:

• Week 3
• Week 2
• Week 1

 

Week 2: 10 Weeks of 10 Stories

It’s hard to believe this was the site of a Civil War battle. Yet, it’s where the Battle of First Manassas was.

10 Weeks of 10 Stories

Story #2 is off to a magazine for their May 31 deadline.  It was a steampunk story, set in an alternate universe for the Civil War. I made use of a trip to the Manassas National Battlefield Park a few years ago, plus some research for a shelved Civil War novel.  In it, women have been recruited into the army because too many men were killed, and they were going to lose without the extra people.

It was a lot of fun to write, though I’ll admit the first day of it was in panic, thinking, “This story is never going to work.”  Day 2 was only slightly better, and then Day 3, it began to work.

Not sure what the next story will be yet.  I have two ideas, but once isn’t due until October, and the other I can’t send until June.

See also:

• Week 1 of 10 Weeks of 10 Stories

 

10 Weeks of 10 Short Stories

I took this flower photo in the early morning when it was raining.

For the next 10 weeks, I’m going to write a short story a week, and submit it to a magazine. This will be in addition to working on my novel.

Story #1 / May 7-11

The first story I started on May 7 and finished on May 11.  It was a fantasy, with a woman soldier, for a magazine requesting submissions for a military theme.

It was scary committing to sending the story out so fast, because it meant I did editing and proofreading, but I did not do any revision.  I’m a pantser, and I tend to leave things out (like the details, description, setting, etc.).  So I had to focus on making sure those elements got into the story.  I didn’t realize how big a deal this would be, because I kept thinking, “It’ll get rejected for that,” and then I thought about the last incarnation of this particular idea. The things I revised into the story probably got it rejected.  So off it went.

Next story on the plate for tomorrow is going to be steampunk — my first steampunk.  Women soldiers again, because the magazine I want to submit to is looking for stories with women protagonists.  Women soldiers is going to put me on the good side of that.  Exactly how many people are writing about that?

If you want to join in and do 10 and 10, please post your progress in the comments.  It’s only ten stories, but also ten submissions.  The only catch is that you have to do your other writing, too, because part of the challenge is managing the time.

 

Six Bullets Accepted!

My short story Six Bullets was accepted for the 2012 Forward Motion Anthology.  The theme was to use a princess, a boatman, and a lizard.  So, me being me, I had the princess enlist in the military at the rank of boatsman (which was like a private) and was chased by soldiers known as Screaming Lizards, for their tattoos.  Look for the anthology in November.  I’ll make an announcement here, since dates can get pushed bac.

 

A Soldier’s Magic Accepted!

My short story, “A Soldier’s Magic” has been accepted by Mosaic Indigo Publishing!  It will be appearing in an anthology called “The Darkness Within,” which is due out in September.  The story is about two female soldiers who have to make the difficult decision to kill a friend to keep a parasite from infecting the military world-wide.

One of the inspirations for the story came from a Vietnam veteran I saw regularly at the community center at Fort Lewis, Washington.  He’d been medically retired, apparently for post traumatic stress syndrome.  He’d come into the community center, sit down, and hallucinate, going back in time to a battle he’d experienced.  So in my story, that Vietnam veteran turned into the friend who has been taken over by the parasite.

The cover to the anthology is not yet available, but I’ll post it and more information as soon as I have it.

 

Ray Bradbury on Writing and Rejection

Sometimes the most discouraging thing about writing is getting a story rejected — especially when we know it’s good. Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who died earlier this year, talks about perseverance and rejection:

 

Half a Year Check-in: Thinking Beyond the Words

This year, I did something I’d never done before with my writing: I set goals.  I had taken one of Bob Mayer’s classes, and he stressed the importance of goals.  Most writers start writing a novel with the goal of “get published” and never think beyond that.  I didn’t for a long time.

But this is the time of thinking beyond the words to what’s going to get me out there.

I started 2012 thinking that I would have my contemporary fantasy/thriller Miasma done by now, and I’d be working on a second book.  Then I ran across a local critique group, and well … my world building needed more world building.  What I thought was a lot of world building for me was not even enough to be adequate.  Too many indie writers toss their books out before they’re really ready, so I had to go back and revise.

My muse hated it.  It was bored, and it’s been a struggle to get through yet another revision of this story.  I had struggled through massive word count issues with this book, got it to completed draft, and submitted it to agents.  But when an agent gave me a personal response with comments, it hit me that everything I did to get the word count up had hurt the book a lot.  I wasn’t sure how to solve the problem, and I took the book through Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel.  Even with that, it still had problems that have been challenging to resolve.

After going to ConTemporal last month, it made me rethink what my actual goals are.  Originally, I’d started in short stories, but the market changed a lot.  I kept hearing that agents wanted to see writing credits that were in the same genre family, and none of the paying magazines were taking what I was writing.   At the time, I saw magazines that didn’t pay and made it sound like they were doing the writers a favor by publishing them at all.  I also thought some of the problems I was having making novels work were habits from short stories (some of which is true), and I was having trouble managing the time between short stories and novels.  So I put short stories on hold and haven’t really been published in years because I’ve been working on novels.

That didn’t set too well with me.  With novels taking so long to write, I still need to get visibility.  I decided to take a few weeks off the novel and do short stories and articles, some of the result of which has been Sand Dollar Wishes (my grandmother died the day after I wrote this story), a short story called Death Seer in submission to anthology, and Balancing Writing and Blogging, which was accepted at Vision.  A fourth is waiting to be critiqued and submitted by the end of the month.  As shocking as it sounds, I’m not going to worry if the magazine pays or not.  I want my stories to be out there.  Pay is nice, but being out there is more important to me.  I can either not be published and hoping for payment, or be published and be out there.

These are my revised goals for the rest of the year:

• Get stories and articles submitted where ever they fit.
• Go to at least one more science fiction convention this year.
• Try to figure out how to apply my revision successes with short stories to a novel so it can get done faster.
• Figure out how to balance writing a novel with getting out short stories and articles on a regular basis.
• Do more to promote myself — but in ways that are me and aren’t going to be the constant marketing that a lot of writers are doing.

For the last one, I’ve been making an effort to get one of my publications into my blog posts now that some are available for you to read.  I’ve also been changing up my signature line on some writing message boards to give visibility to these stories.  I’ve also included links to specific blog posts.

Where are you at in your half a year mark?  Has anyone done short stories and novels together?  How do you balance them?  Post your comments below.

 

When the Novel Bites Back

Out there in a bone graveyard is a place where manuscripts go to die.  We call them the trunked novel.  Sometimes it’s because the novel is so bad that no one should ever witness the horror.  Others have a sordid past that people won’t bother whispering about.

That’s my first novel, Remember No Evil (RNO).  I came from writing short stories, steered there by well-meaning people who thought a novel was too big for me to handle (I was 8 when I started writing).  But novels were what I wanted to write.

I was excited about the story and jumped right in.  About page 100, it stalled.  I didn’t understand why.   Writers tell us now to skip ahead when that happens, but I didn’t know that. I scoured the craft books for advice and didn’t find anything.  So I finally decided to revise what I had.  Surely that would help me find the problem!

Nope.

Got to 100 pages, same problem.  What could it be?  So I continued to look through writing books and try rewriting.  I’d get so stuck that I’d return to short stories for a while, then come back to the book.  No luck.   I followed this pattern for a long time.  I was so frustrated I would have switched to a new novel project, but I didn’t have any other novel-sized ideas.  I didn’t know how to come up with them.

Then one day, I was reading a craft book and something jumped out me.  It said that short story writers often have problems writing longer works.  Could that be it?  The more I thought about it, I realized I had never left the story story mindset.  I had started out writing the book like a long short story.  I also imagined the chapters as long short stories.

So I did an outline based on one in that same book to see if that would help.  At the same time, I was approached by a friend to cowrite a book.  He was familiar with the problems I was having and thought our strengths could shore up the other’s weaknesses.  That meant a new book from scratch.

I’d have to stop writing RNO.  I felt on the verge of getting past the 100 page hump.  But I also realized that if I didn’t switch to a new book I might never finish one.  I couldn’t trunk it even though I know knew I should, so I decided to set it aside with option to return to it after I finished what became Valley of Bones.  No stalls on page 100.  I’d finally finished a novel!

Now with that success in place, I returned to RNO and now understood somewhere along the way I’d grown out of the story.  It carried a lot of baggage from all the rewrites, and the idea was no longer me.  Cowriter thought we could tackle it after Valley of Bones, but no, I wasn’t going to resurrect it from the grave.

What’s your trunk novel story?

 

When I Decided to Become A Writer

Over at Kill Zone, James Scott Bell asks the above question.   I like James Scott Bell because his writing advice tries to accommodate all writers, not just ones who write a particular way.  Here’s what he asks:

So when did you decide to become a writer? Was it a specific moment? A particular influence? And what did it feel like when you started on your quest?

I was eight and it was fourth grade.  My best friend Rebekah was writing a class play, and I wanted to do it because she was doing it.  So I decided I wanted to write a novel.  My parents suggested I do short stories, so I started writing mystery stories with a girl detective like Nancy Drew.  I even illustrated them, and part of the fun of them was socializing with the other kids over them. Some of the other kids also drew pictures for them.  I remember one story had its own story behind it — a series of disasters like getting dropped into a puddle.  That one had three different kids illustrate it!

When did you decide to become a writer?  Tell me in the comments.