A Week of Writing: 9/13/21 to 9/19/21

September is shaping up to be halfway decent month. Here’s week three.

Words to Write By

Another quote about revision. This one is from author Henry Green. 

“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”

― Henry Green

I’m at the place in the revision of Hell to Play where I’m gonna leave out a lot. As I’ve said before, I tend to get really talky and redundant in the middle of my novels, and I desperately need to fix that in the current one. I expect to lose five, maybe ten thousand words of extraneous conversations and scenes that go nowhere. I’m hoping this will allow the reader to a) enjoy a much improved pacing and b) focus on the important things in these chapters, like world-building and character development. In other words, I want to highlight these attributes of the book, like Henry Green says.

Short Story Submissions

A good and productive week in submission land.

• Submissions Sent: 3
• Rejections: 2
• Acceptances: 1
• Publications: 0
• Shortlist: 0
• Pending: 15
• 2021 Total Subs: 81

I sent three submissions last week, giving me a total of 81 for the year. Unless I just stop sending out subs, I’ll hit my goal of 100 for the year easily. The good news from last week, though, is the acceptance. It snapped a streak of 23 rejections, and the story I sold had racked up 16 rejections all by itself. A nice sale that vaulted my acceptance year from worst ever to merely terrible. I’m hoping for tolerably bad by the end of the 2021. The two rejections were of the form variety, and they stand out only because they’re from markets I’ve never submitted to before. One was a higher-tier, so I might try them again.

The Novel

I made more progress on the revision of Hell to Play last week, revising through chapter nine and writing half of one of the new chapters I’ll be adding. These new chapters are from the villain’s POV, a millennia-old demon, and they’re gonna be fun. They’ll accomplish a couple of things. One, they’ll add depth and clearer motivations for my antagonist, and two, they’ll add important world-building details, especially in how magic and demons operate in my world (important stuff). As I said in another post, the first 100 pages were pretty solid, so the revisions weren’t too tough. Now we’re getting to the middle and the hard work, which will be primarily cutting extraneous scenes to improve the pacing. I’m not looking forward to it because I know it’ll be difficult, but, I’m gonna dive in and do my best. It’s never as bad as I think it’s gonna be.  (I hope.)

Commission Work

I signed another contract with Privateer Press to write more fiction in their new Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika setting, and I’ll be starting the necessary reading and outlining this week. It’s another very comfortable deadline that I’ll undoubtedly bring in early. Looking forward to this writing and working with my old pals at Privateer again.

Goals

Busy week. I need to get going on the commission work, keep revising the novel, and get more submissions out. In that order of priority.

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That was my week. How was yours?