A Week of Writing: 9/17/18 to 9/23/18

Welcome to my Monday and another week of writing.

Words to Write By

This week’s quote is from Truman Capote.

“Good writing is rewriting.”

—Truman Capote

I’ve seen similar quotes from a number of writers, but Capote’s is probably the most succinct. Every published story or novel has likely gone through a number of revisions where the author has rewritten, revised, and reworked the plot, the characters, the prose, you name it. That’s where I’m at now, laboriously addressing all the problems in the first draft of my novel Late Risers, trying to turn writing into a good writing. My guess is I’ll turn writing into okay writing this round, and then maybe get to something approaching good in the next pass.

The Novel

Last week the second round of revisions started in earnest. The main goal was to write at least one of the new chapters that’ll go at the beginning of the book. I accomplished that (and a few other things), and this week I’ll write the second new chapter and probably a bit more. These new chapters address a couple of sizable issues my critique partners pointed out in their notes, namely in setting up the rules of my world and better establishing an important relationship between my protagonist and another character. I’m pretty happy with the first new chapter, and now that I’ve really taken stock of what needs to be fixed in the rest of the novel, it’s not too bad, very doable, in fact.

Short Stories

I got back on track with short story submissions last week. I also started a new short story I quite like and knocked out a couple of thousand words on it. I hope to finish that one this week.

• Submissions Sent: 4
• Rejections: 3
• Acceptances: 0
• Publications: 0
• Shortlist: 0

The four submissions I sent last week put me at 93 for the year. Getting really close to that 100 mark.

The Blog

Two blog posts last week.

9/18/18: A Week of Writing: 9/10/18 to 9/16/18

The usual weekly writing update.

9/21/18: The Long View II: Genre Markets for Novelettes & Novellas

In this post I took another look at genre markets for works over 7,500 words in length.

Goals

This week I want to finish all the new chapters for the novel, and then start the actual revisions and rewriting on the existing text. I’d also like to finish the short story I started last week and get that to my critique partners.

Submission Spotlight

This week I’d like to call your attention to a market I’ve been meaning to submit to forever and finally got around to doing it last week. They’re a well-regarded publisher with one of the coolest names in the biz, especially if you’re a big dinosaur nerd like me. The market is GigaNotoSaurus, and they accept fantasy and science fiction stories from 5,000 to 25,000 words. That’s a nice spread, and they’re one the few paying markets that’ll take novelettes and novellas. You can check out GigaNotoSaurus‘ submission guidelines below.

GigaNotoSaurus Submission Guidelines

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That was my week. How was yours?