SFR Month 2 Day 1

SFR 2006:
59 / 90 days to go | 31 / 90 days gone
17,540 / 90,000 words done | 14,358 words behind

Dragonfly: 898
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4169
Blogs: 9660

Month Two is starting out with a nice bang. :) I spent my evening editting Dragonfly. That was a short piece I did two Februaries ago (2005), based on an extremely strong and realistic dream. I'd entertained the thought of polishing it up to submit somewhere at the time, but then kind of let it drop until now.

Why now? I found somewhere to submit it. Stumbled across it in an early Miss Snark, actually. (thanks again to ellsea! :) ) The publication is Glimmer Train, and it's two women with a quarterly that like literary fiction. I don't know what else to call Dragonfly other than literary fiction. Based on their website, it looks like a pretty good magazine. And if Miss Snark endorsed it, it can't be that bad, right?

First prize for their "very short fiction" contest is $1200 and publication. Second and third are $500 and $300. Obviously I'd like to win first, so if people have some time to read and critique 898 words, I'd very much appreciate it. :) I ran it past one (non-writer) person already and he said it was good, so I have hope... I posted it as a reply to my original post in the member's only workshop forum.

Meanwhile, I am still considering doing something for the Asian American Writers Workshop contest. I sent an email asking whether they really mean what their announcement says - "no theme! no page limit! only requirement is to be Asian!" - ...and sadly, the answer was no. :( The sponsors of the contest are both really big on stuff that's about the Asian American experience, so of course the contest winner would have to be something about that. That pretty much eliminates the bus story, which is about a black bus driver and God posing as a white guy, on a cross-country trip, that has no Asian/Asian American subplots or characters in it.

I don't know. I don't really define myself by my ethnicity. Yes, I'm of Asian descent, but so what? It's not that noteworthy to me. I still spent a few hours trying to brainstorm up some possible short stories I could write about it, and ... well, I got nothing. My response to the whole question of "What's it like to be Asian American?" is basically "uhhh.... " [*shrugging smileys*]

My brother suggested I write some kind of inspirational feel-good story about something out of my childhood, but that sounds boringly formulaic. I didn't have that interesting of a childhood. :p At least nothing that could be turned into a story with an actual plot.

As for the Chinese Takeout thing, that did take up a lot of my brainstorm time, but honestly I don't see that as being anything fictional. It's going to be a memoir-like thing if I do it. There's no plot, therefore it's not that kind of story. If I do it, the obvious places to try submitting would be New Yorker first, then Hyphen (which doesn't pay, sadly). Maybe I'll run across some other magazines for that.

Obviously I've fallen way out of the groove for Fortress Launne. Those are still on the back burner of things to do, notably Temple and Amulet II. Temple might not be the first thing I try to submit somewhere; its structure is possibly still too complex for me to do properly right now, and after reading some of the sample first-pages that Miss Snark shot down, and noticing that my first chapter of Temple resembles the rejects more than the non-suckies ... erm, yeah. I'll just crawl back into my hole now.

Amulet II at least has a straightforward chronological-order structure. I might get around to looking at that again pretty soon.