A Week of Writing: 9/3/18 to 9/9/18

It’s Monday, and I’m back on track with weekly, writerly updates.

Words to Write By

Today’s quotes comes from one of my favorite fantasy authors, Robin Hobb.

The challenge is always to find the good place to end the book. The rule I follow with myself is that every book should end where the next book would logically begin. I know that some readers wish that literally all of the threads would be neatly tied off and snipped, but life just doesn’t work that way.

– Robin Hobb

I wholeheartedly agree with Robin Hobb here. To me, there’s something really artificial about an ending that ties everything up neatly, and it always leaves me unsatisfied. Like she says, life doesn’t work that way. I think life is largely a collection of loose threads we spend, well, a lifetime trying to resolve. Although fiction doesn’t have to reflect how the real world works, this is an area where I try to cleave as close to reality as I can. The ending of Late Risers is messy, the resolution of some plot points uncertain, and I’m fine with that. Some of this has to do with my hope there will be a another book, but, even if there is only this one, I think Late Risers works as a standalone novel. (I really just hope it works as a novel, period.)

The Novel

My critique partners have finished my novel Late Risers, and I have their notes. The good news is a lot of the problems are ones I suspected were there, and my critique partners are in agreement on the major issues. That makes my job a lot easier, since we’re all basically on the same page with what is wrong with the book. The other good news is they liked the draft, the story, the concept, and the writing. Yes, there’s work to do on all of those elements, but after getting the notes, I think the first draft went about as well as I could have hoped.

This week I’m going to dive in and start my second round of revisions. I’ll still focus on fixing big-picture problems first, then worry about tightening the prose after that.

Short Stories

Not a whole lot to report on this front. I did get one story back that has had a number of near misses, and I promptly sent it out again. I tinkered with some old stories, and even unearthed an ancient short story from a backup hard drive that has a great concept with some, uh, archaic writing. That’ll be my next short story project. I currently have nine submissions pending with various publishers.

A very slow week for submissions.

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

I have 89 submissions for the year, and I’m still on a very comfortable pace to hit my goal of 100.

The Blog

Here are the blog posts from the last couple of weeks.

8/27/18: A Week of Writing: 8/20/18 to 8/26/18

The usual weekly writing update.

8/31/18: Submission Protocol: Summary Execution

Another entry in the submission protocol series. In this one I discuss summarizing your short story when a publisher asks for a synopsis.

9/4/18: Submission Statement: July & August 2018

I missed the July submission statement, so this is two months of my submission endeavors.

9/7/18: Iron Kingdoms Fiction – Peace of Mind

Another Iron Kingdoms story originally published in the pages of No Quarter magazine.

Goals

One major goal for the week: start the second round of revisions on Late Risers. Everything else will take a backseat until that’s finished.

Submission Spotlight

This week I’d like to point you at a brand new pro-paying (.06/word) speculative fiction market called Constellary Tales. Here’s what they’re looking for:

We love SF stories that carry characters from their beginning to their end. That take the reader along on the journey of discovery (or loss, or redemption, or whatever). And of course, they have to be speculative. The name “Constellary” betrays our love for science fiction, but we’re fans of fantasy too.

Note, they’re closed to submissions from September 11th through September 30th–no doubt to sort through the tons of submissions they’ve already received–but they will reopen to submissions on October 1st. Guidelines in the link below.

Constellary Tales Guidelines

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That was my week. How was yours?