The day has finally arrived. Applications are due by April 1, 2007. It’s going to be a hectic. I need to finish edits on both stories, finish filling out the application, and submit.
We’re going out to breakfast with family and then I need to get busy.
The first draft is complete! Huzzah!
First drafts are by their very nature rough and ugly creatures. Hopefully they are all minor and easily correctable. Tomorrow begins the revision process where I can rip, shred, and rewrite chunks of the story. For the most part I think it’s a story. It has a beginning, middle, and an end. Now I need to make sure and verify those pesky things like plot, continuity, point of view, narration, etc.
I’m short on the minimum word count but by less than two hundred characters. That will easily be remedied as I go back and revise. Wish me luck. I’m on third base and I’m making a run for the plate.
I’m entering the final stretches. Today was a crappy day. Lots of real work to do. No measurable progress.
Tomorrow (Thursday) night would normally be my writers group meeting. Instead of going to that I’ll be heading out and finding a nice corner to sit in and writing. I’ll have a solid five or more hours uninterrupted. I plan on finishing this draft and taking Friday off work so I can edit. Hopefully I’ll be able to get one or two people to give me some feedback on the draft so I can polish it up. By the time Saturday rolls around I should have both stories ready to go.
Not much measurable progress. I’ve been fighting against the urge to expand this piece beyond a short story. This is the first trip into the cyberpunk world I’ve been thinking about for months now and the stories it contain keep calling out to me.
I think I’m going to take the afternoon off work tomorrow and park myself at Panera until this draft is finished. That will leave a few days to smooth out a few obvious rough spots. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It only needs to show my potential, as it were.
I’ve gotten a comments and well-wishes from several of you. Thanks, it means the world to me. I’m looking forward to the day I can share this world with everyone.
I really should think of wittier titles.
A disappointing day, writing-wise. I’m smack dab in the middle of the story and I only managed 100 words tonight. I was just getting into the flow of it when work interrupted. I forgot to close my instant message client, oops.
I’m still confident that I’ll be done in time. I’ll soldier on until the end. I need to just sit down and hammer through the rest of the draft and then go back and smooth it out. I’ve got it all in my head, it just needs to be let out. One day someone will invent a neural interface so that I can write in my sleep.
496 new words and a few edits to last nights work for a grand total of 1,121. I’m roughly a third of the way through the story.
I’m trying not to race through to the finish even though I am under a tight deadline. There are some interesting elements to the story that I’d like to play with a bit more as I tighten it up. It’s fun experimenting with cyberpunk themes. It’s a genre I can see myself spending quite a bit of time working in.
The rest of the day was spent working on taxes and fighting a sinus infection. Hopefully that will clear itself up soon. I’m going to be drinking lots of caffeine this week to get things wrapped up and the last thing I need is a lingering cold to slow me down.
One week until Clarion applications are due.
I’ve made good progress today, despite not being home for most of it. 585 words written and roughly 3,000 to go. The story is coming along as I expected. I should outline more often. Working through the major elements of the story before I began seems to have helped.
So far, so good. I’ll need to kick it up a notch if I want to finish this draft, get some quick feedback from a first reader or two and have some time to fix up the glaring mistakes in both stories I’m using for my application. I might not get a lot of time for polishing, but I think that will be okay. There are more important details to consider. Thanks Trey
Another day off the calendar, another day closer to the April 1st deadline. I didn’t get any work done on the new story. There were too many work issues today and I’m too tired to do anything productive now. Going to get some sleep and make day seven a productive one. I should be able to finish a complete draft by the end of the weekend, giving me a full five days to tighten up both stories.
I’m gathering some statistics to torture myself with once my application is submitted. There are only 18 people are accepted into Clarion. At least one person has already received an early acceptance. If I can find out the average number of applicants per year I could figure out the statistics at being accepted. The wait for the phone call acceptance or snail mail rejection will be painful either way but this way I’ll keep my mind occupied.
I’ve been thinking about Clarion for nearly five years now. Every year I have talked myself out of applying due to the difficulty of getting the time off of work. I tell myself that next year will be a better time to apply.
After giving it a lot of thought and talkign to my friend shweta from AbsoluteWrite, who’s already been accepted for the class of 2007, I have decided to get my application in and worry about the logistics if I get approved.
The application requires two short stories between 2,500 and 6,000 words. I only have one recent story that falls into that range that is representative of my current writing abilities. That gives me nine days, between now and April 1st, to write a second story and edit both of them up so that they represent the best work I’m currently capable of.
I still need to maintain my work load but as long as I don’t procrastinate and waste time there is no reason I can’t make the deadline. The added bonus is that April 1st is also the deadline for the workshop at Penguicon.
As a matter of accountability, I’m going to post daily updates. If you see me miss an update, feel free to send me angry emails and tell me to stop being a slacker.
Last night I typed up all of the notes I had about the new story and tonight I write a 700 word outline.
I’ve been keeping pretty busy between work and writing so here’s some quick bullets.