Wednesday's Writing Update

Happy New Year!

My new year started off pretty uneventful, but it's already getting busy. Busy can be good, though.

First off, I'm being interviewed today on Jenn Nixon's blog. Please take a moment to stop by and read the interview and leave a comment. By the way, certain authors are mentioned who inspire me, so you might want to drop by to see if you are mentioned. *hint hint nudge nudge* And, if you aren't mentioned, I still love you anyways. I couldn't list everyone!

Over the holiday, I finished reading THE LAST HUNTER: DESCENT by Jeremy Robinson. It was awesome, and you can read the review here.

If you check Thursday and Friday's posts, you can read my writing resolutions and my last flash fiction for 2010.

I received my first dejection (thanks, Ken, for that word) this year. On January 4, 2010, I submitted "Defying Gravity" to Pill Hill Press's Fire & Ice anthology. On February 25, 2010, my story was short listed. On Monday, I received an email. They had to cancel the anthology due to lack of submissions, so my story was released back to me to do as I wish. Granted, I would've loved to have been in this anthology, I'm not disappointed. "Defying Gravity" is nearly 9,000 words long. I could easily expand it and make it between 10,000 and 15,000. This is what I plan to do, and then I could submit it to some epublishers that accept short stories. I have several in mind, depending on the length the story ends up. I'm excited about these possibilities.

This was a revelation to me receiving this "dejection." A rejection isn't the end of the world. It was a surprise to me too. A story or novel may not work for one person. It may need more work, and that's okay. If you call yourself a writer, you need to be willing to put in the work, and yes, writing is work. A story might not be right for one person, but a good story can find hope elsewhere, and I like that idea. I have these old short stories. Each one was rejected, but you know what. I can shiny them up and send them back out. As another resolution, I'd like to fix one of these old short stories every month. I might even start back with "Defying Gravity." I have new ideas for that one. It should be good.

I finished my new plot outline for Virtuoso over the weekend. In order to finish this new draft by the end of February/early March, I need to write/rewrite three chapters a week. I'm also editing a bit as I go with them, so hopefully when I send them to my critique partners, they won't have much line editing to do and can focus on content. So far, so good. I'm half-way through rewriting chapter two, and I did some interested research on comas yesterday morning.

I received my third assignment from PWP. So far, the story is good, and I've only had to add commas and change a few words here and there. It's 245 pages, so I hope to finish it in a week and a half to two weeks. If I edit 20 pages a day, it'll take around two weeks, and twenty pages is completely doable with everything else I have to do.

I have one short story I need to write this week (Fangtales submission) and one next week (Raven and the Writing Desk short story). I've even taken to writing brief outlines for short stories, so I can keep all my ideas for them straight. I've been getting so many ideas lately that I have to write them down or I'll forget them. It's horrible, in a good way!

I also plan to write next week's flash fiction by next week.

I have one submission out there in submission world, and I'm hoping to add another next week.

So, with lots to do, I better start doing it.