A Week of Writing: 12/7/20 to 12/13/20

Another week down. Here’s how I did.

Words to Write By

Here’s a classic quote from William Faulkner.

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

― William Faulkner

We’ve all heard this one before, and it’s been repeated by a lot of authors. What does it mean, though? Like all writing advice, its open to interpretation, and it likely means different things to different writers. For me, a darling is usually a humorous line of dialogue or a character thought I fall in love with that doesn’t really fit. For whatever reason, profanity is often involved. In other words, I’ll get a kick out of some crass line, even though it’s not really appropriate for the character or situation. For example, even the most foul-mouthed character will likely clean up their act a little at a job interview. Anyway, as I revise the novel, more of these darlings are jumping out at me, and, sadly, I’m murdering every potty-mouthed little angel I come across. A moment of motherfucking silence, if you please. 🙂

The Novel

I’m fighting the end-of-year doldrums but slowly working on the revision of Hell to Play. Last week I added 2,000 words to the book, material that served as a much-needed break in the action and fleshed out the protagonist’s back story a bit. I like how it turned out. As I mentioned in Word to Write By, I’ve also been pruning the existing text and working on the specific voices of the two primary characters. I think that’s been successful, and it’s helped differentiate their voices in dialogue, which was an issue in the first draft. Anyway, slowly but surely getting to a revised novel I can show my agent.

Short Story Submissions

Yeah, kind of dropped the ball on submissions.

• Submissions Sent: 0
• Rejections: 5
• Acceptances: 0
• Publications: 0
• Shortlist: 0
• Pending: 7

No submissions last week. I don’t even have a very good reason as to why other than those end-of-year doldrums I mentioned. I did get a boatload of rejections, though, and two of them were shortlist rejections from prominent pro markets. Both rejections came on the same day, by the way. Most of the time, rejections don’t bother me much, but these stung a bit. When you get a further consideration or shortlist notice, you can’t help but get your hopes up a little, so when that rejection comes, it’s harder to just shake it off. That said, getting shortlisted at these markets is a good thing, and I just need to keep writing and keep sending them my work.

Goals

The usual: keep going on the novel revision and try and get some more submissions out. It’d be nice to hit 90 subs by end of year, and I only need four more that.

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And that was my week. How was yours?