A Week of Writing: 7/9/18 to 7/15/18

Welcome to another week of writerly works.

Words to Write By

This week’s quote deals with those tricky endings and even trickier beginnings.

“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”

—Joyce Carol Oates

This quote reflects something I’ve been thinking about as I go through the first draft of my novel. It’s very clear that even if I stick the landing, I’ll almost certainly need to rework the beginning to match. For me, I think this has a lot to do with how I approach longer works. Though I work from an outline, the first couple of chapters are this “feeling things out” stage both with the plot and the characters. I hit something resembling a stride after about 10,000 words, but I leave a lot of clunky characterization in my wake before that. Anyway, I’m looking forward to getting that final sentence written (revised), so I can take another shot at the first sentence.

The Novel

Made more solid progress, and I’m about a quarter of the way through the initial revisions. I made some big changes last week again, matching chapters and character motivations to the new setup. I also completely changed an important secondary character. He just never quite worked for me, and a lot of it had to do with how blandly I described him. I happened to see someone on TV, I can’t even remember which show, and something clicked, and I was like, “That’s him. That’s the character.” It was more of an appearance thing than personality, though the change in appearance has opened a lot of new avenues for interesting character hooks.

Short Stories

Worked on revisions of a couple of short stories last week, though I didn’t write any new ones. This week will likely be focused on revisions as well, as I need to polish up a couple of stories for two pro markets briefly open to submissions.

A slow(ish) week for submissions.

• Submissions Sent: 2
• Rejections: 2
• Acceptances: 1
• Publications: 0

I only sent two submission last week, though one of them was accepted. (I’ll take a fifty percent acceptance rate any week.) I’m up to 74 submissions for the year, and I’d like to hit at least 80 before the month is out.

The Blog

Two blog posts last week.

7/9/18: A Week of Writing: 7/2/18 to 7/8/18

The usual weekly writing update.

7/12/18: Go for the Goal: 100 Submissions

In this post I talk about my goal of 100 submissions for the year and why I’m pursuing it.

Goals

Cue the broken record. Keep working on the novel and keep sending those submissions.

Submission Spotlight

Flame Tree Publishing has an open call for two more anthologies, Haunted House and Cozy Crime. Flame Tree is an SFWA qualifying market (with pay rates to match). They’re okay with reprints, simultaneous submissions, and multiple submissions. Deadline for these two anthologies is 7/29/18. More details in the link below.

Flame Tree Publishing Anthologies 

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That was my week. How was yours?