One good thing about being broke is that paper and ink is cheap and ideas are free.
I’ve managed to do a fair bit of new writing in the past couple of months but I’ve been bad about blogging about it. New stories written, old stories rewritten, a handful of submissions and nearly as many rejections. I even submitted to the Writers of the Future contest after years of talking about doing it. Five stories are in the wild right now. Hopefully I can double that by years end.
I’m toying with the idea of attempting NaNoWriMo again this year. I’ve tried it off and on, most recently two years ago. Life went crazy an ended that effort prematurely. Two ideas are vying for attention — the urban fantasy I started in 2007, following three long-lived brothers with magical tattoos hunting the non-sparkly bad guys that killed their parents, and a more contemporary fantasy but with Dwarves, airships, and a clockwork army. Think steampunk but with lightning instead of steam. Sparkpunk. If I don’t do NaNo, I’ll at least knock out a few more short stories, possibly in these two worlds. They’re both fun to play in.
My TODO list for October resembles the following:
- Revise my Hodag story, due by October 15th
- Decide if I’m going to do NaNoWriMo
- Outline NaNoWriMo story
- Write a Zombie flash fiction story, due by October 16th
- Organize my list of upcoming anthologies/themes that I want to submit to
- Revise and submit “Starry, Starry Night”
- Revise and submit Augmented Reality story
- Rewrite “Recycled Dreams”
What are you working on?
It looks like, if all goes according to plan, you’ll come out of October with a nice body of completed work.
I have done NaNoWriMo eight times now and I think it’s a good exercise for short fiction writers who want to move into a longer form. We’re so used to compressing and squeezing the most out of every word that it almost takes something like NaNo to give ourselves permission to let go and open up for something as big as a novel.
That’s one thing I want to get out of the NaNo experience. I feel like I’m writing my short fiction too tight, at times. Or I’ll rush the story because I want to get to the end and what’s left feels incomplete. I’m getting better about it, but one argument for NaNo is that by writing with that larger goal, where the 50,000 mark is really only the halfway mark, I’ll be less likely to hurry the story and more concentrating on putting it all down on paper. I’d like to be more cutter, less filling-iner.