So today I heard that a new specfic online magazine, Uncanny, has just finished setting up and are ready for short story submissions. They want "intricate, experimental stories and poems with gorgeous prose, verve, and imagination that elicit strong emotions and challenge beliefs." Well, it occurs to me that Dragonfly might definitely count as experimental, and it has certainly elicited strong emotions in a few people that have read it (notably evilkate, even though I can no longer find where I would've posted it where she could've seen it anymore...). Plus the magazine is so new that there is no example of what they're looking for yet so, in theory anyway, that possibly means the style field is wide open!
It took me a while to find my last good draft of Dragonfly. The original draft from March 2005 is everywhere in my files, but I had the revised version buried. Luckily, the search feature on this Mac works pretty good, and I found one from Oct 16 2009 - which would've been right before I sent it off to Glimmer Train before. I think I'll give it a detailed reread this weekend and if it still looks presentable, I'll send it on out again.
Showing posts with label Dragonfly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dragonfly. Show all posts
2014/09/11
2010/02/15
Just a general update
Well, let's see. Dragonfly didn't win, and didn't make the top 25 finalists list either. I showed it around to a local writing group I joined a few weeks ago, called The Matchbox Society, which is sort of like a critique circle. Every week we (supposedly) meet at the local coffeehouse (the same one we used during Nanowrimo, which is how these people found us) (and by "us" I mean me and one other diehard; there were four of us back in November but two of them disappeared over the break), and take turns sharing material for critique. The idea is to read stuff out loud - but, most of the group is poets, so it makes sense they'd come up with that rule; I'm not sure it works so well for longer prose. And I didn't read Dragonfly out loud to them, just handed out copies on paper.
The other thing I dislike about the group is their habit of posting up work for review on a public website. Low traffic perhaps, but even so, first publication rights can come into play. Which is why I printed out Dragonfly on paper for them. I should probably say something to them about this at the next meeting.
Anyhoo. So overall they liked it. One wanted me to go more into detail about the elephants. One pointed out that dragonflies don't have proboscises, they have mandibles. Several said that some of my extra phrases were repetitive and could be removed. So, all in all, I get to revise it some more before sending it out again. I haven't picked out the next place it's going yet - have to look around on Duotrope.
My next idea is to start showing them Edward in installments, one at a time. This would motivate me to actually work on it in advance of showing it to them. But, I haven't gotten back into fiction lately because nonfiction (aka Brighthub) has been eating up all my time and brainpower.
Ahh, Brighthub. Lots and lots of new bureaucratic hoops. Like only being allowed to write 5 articles per month as a newbie. In January I didn't manage to write anything at all for them due to all the snafus they were having. This month I've written three so far, two of which are published, one of which is still stuck in editor committee. I'm committed to a fourth and haven't figured out what to do for the fifth yet - ideally, something in genetics will grab my attention if the editor ever puts up the second list. If not, I'll probably end up doing a third gaming article, since that's where I'm most likely to get high views.
I joined gaming so that I could write some high-view articles to carry my low-view science articles, so that I'll continue to be allowed to write articles past April. So far it looks like it might actually work - especially if this month's science articles carry themselves. The new editors for those channels have both gone with "here's a list of keywords, pick two at a time." So, less freedom for me to write whatever I want. However, it makes sense to write articles that people are actually searching for, and in Environmental Science at least, they're still fairly interesting topics.
Gaming, meanwhile, is all about having people suggest what they want to write. It's a very large community, and the main editor doesn't actually pay much attention to individual articles. There's not a whole lot of editting going on. He just approves the topic idea, then when I submit it, he publishes it. I assume he must at least glance over it first, but he doesn't notice typos so it isn't a very close read. I'm also supposed to figure out all of my own keywords. Which means that a few days ago I got to playing around with SEO Book.
Basically, it tells me what people are searching on. It doesn't tell me how many good results they get, however, so I'm still out of luck on that one (though I suppose I could just google them all myself to see what comes up). On the other hand, I can use it for more than just Brighthub gaming articles, and thus, I have new plans...
1. Check and tweak the SEO of every eHow article, starting with the oldest.
I've already fixed up my earwax article; if it got as many views as the electric toothbrush one, it would actually be my top earner. I still need to tweak the toothbrush one too. Also did one of the two Dragon Cave articles (since my 4th Brighthub is also going to be about Dragon Cave, that's how I got to looking at the eHow articles...). After that, oldest first.
2. Once they're all tweaked, make blog posts that list all articles to date, both eHow and Brighthub.
Evilkate tells me that blog links are excellent for search engine rankings, and since I have two that get indexed (my main blog, also here on Blogger, and my LJ), why not use them? I might start posting monthly summaries of my articles if I really get prolific at this. Plus I've been putting the science ones at SFFMuse too, so I'll continue to do that. And tweet them of course.
3. It turns out that a lot of the eHow articles would've made more money at Associated Content after all. They pay $1.50 per 1,000 views. Basically what it boils down to is that high view, low earnings eHow articles would earn more at that flat rate. Which is, sadly, most of them.
a. Such as gaming articles. Those still work best at Brighthub rather than AC, because not only do we get paid by number of views, we also get the $10 advance. However, gaming articles rejected from Brighthub (if any) will just go there.
b. Also, new plan for the Bloons series. How to win for Bloons 1 and 4 are already at eHow and might as well stay there. Bloons 2 and 3 articles can go over to AC. The three-part guide I want to do for Brighthub will still go there if they ever let me into PC Gaming, and then my overall index to everything will be at AC as well.
c. The main Dragon Cave article is going to get copied over to AC under their nonexclusive display-only policy. That article gets a ridiculous number of views, like twice what the electric toothbrush article gets, and yet earns very little (like a third of what electric toothbrush gets). Having it in both places will mean that it competes with itself - but I've already linked everyone at Dragonspam LJ to eHow, and that's where all the links point, so I don't want to remove it. I did tweak up the SEO on it some though.
And speaking of Dragon Cave - there's a lot of search for guides about what egg hatches into what, so I'll be pitching to write a guide at Brighthub next month too. (Right after I pitch my Restaurant City ingredients guide that I'd also like to write; unless I write that this month if genetics falls through).
4. The other big thing I want to do for gaming is a series about Emperor: RotMK. The main con is that it's an older game, out since 2003. I'll probably have to prove that people search about it. However, I've been playing it a LOT lately, and want to write "how to set up housing right at the start", "how to set up trade", and "how to take care of menagerie animals." I could also do a review article, or an overall intro to the game kind of guide article (or several).
My first choice would be to put this up at Brighthub, if I get into PC Gaming. Failing that, Associated Content.
5. Any science article rejects are still planned for Google Knol so far. Though I've also looked at HubPages, which Robert likes. I'm kind of on the fence so far, and probably won't decide until/unless Brighthub actually rejects something. They haven't so far.
6. And speaking of Knol. I really, really should get around to Mandarin Teaching Alphabet to start myself off there. (Then again, there are a couple eHows I've had on my list for over a year - grid method on Robert's Celtic bird, and "how to eat healthy" which should do well at a place like eHow). (Plus I need to update my "how to make money online" article, even though it doesn't make any actual money.)
So, lots to do. And it's good to have a plan. Of course, so far I'm just doing the procrastination part of the proceedings. But I'll get going eventually...
The other thing I dislike about the group is their habit of posting up work for review on a public website. Low traffic perhaps, but even so, first publication rights can come into play. Which is why I printed out Dragonfly on paper for them. I should probably say something to them about this at the next meeting.
Anyhoo. So overall they liked it. One wanted me to go more into detail about the elephants. One pointed out that dragonflies don't have proboscises, they have mandibles. Several said that some of my extra phrases were repetitive and could be removed. So, all in all, I get to revise it some more before sending it out again. I haven't picked out the next place it's going yet - have to look around on Duotrope.
My next idea is to start showing them Edward in installments, one at a time. This would motivate me to actually work on it in advance of showing it to them. But, I haven't gotten back into fiction lately because nonfiction (aka Brighthub) has been eating up all my time and brainpower.
Ahh, Brighthub. Lots and lots of new bureaucratic hoops. Like only being allowed to write 5 articles per month as a newbie. In January I didn't manage to write anything at all for them due to all the snafus they were having. This month I've written three so far, two of which are published, one of which is still stuck in editor committee. I'm committed to a fourth and haven't figured out what to do for the fifth yet - ideally, something in genetics will grab my attention if the editor ever puts up the second list. If not, I'll probably end up doing a third gaming article, since that's where I'm most likely to get high views.
I joined gaming so that I could write some high-view articles to carry my low-view science articles, so that I'll continue to be allowed to write articles past April. So far it looks like it might actually work - especially if this month's science articles carry themselves. The new editors for those channels have both gone with "here's a list of keywords, pick two at a time." So, less freedom for me to write whatever I want. However, it makes sense to write articles that people are actually searching for, and in Environmental Science at least, they're still fairly interesting topics.
Gaming, meanwhile, is all about having people suggest what they want to write. It's a very large community, and the main editor doesn't actually pay much attention to individual articles. There's not a whole lot of editting going on. He just approves the topic idea, then when I submit it, he publishes it. I assume he must at least glance over it first, but he doesn't notice typos so it isn't a very close read. I'm also supposed to figure out all of my own keywords. Which means that a few days ago I got to playing around with SEO Book.
Basically, it tells me what people are searching on. It doesn't tell me how many good results they get, however, so I'm still out of luck on that one (though I suppose I could just google them all myself to see what comes up). On the other hand, I can use it for more than just Brighthub gaming articles, and thus, I have new plans...
1. Check and tweak the SEO of every eHow article, starting with the oldest.
I've already fixed up my earwax article; if it got as many views as the electric toothbrush one, it would actually be my top earner. I still need to tweak the toothbrush one too. Also did one of the two Dragon Cave articles (since my 4th Brighthub is also going to be about Dragon Cave, that's how I got to looking at the eHow articles...). After that, oldest first.
2. Once they're all tweaked, make blog posts that list all articles to date, both eHow and Brighthub.
Evilkate tells me that blog links are excellent for search engine rankings, and since I have two that get indexed (my main blog, also here on Blogger, and my LJ), why not use them? I might start posting monthly summaries of my articles if I really get prolific at this. Plus I've been putting the science ones at SFFMuse too, so I'll continue to do that. And tweet them of course.
3. It turns out that a lot of the eHow articles would've made more money at Associated Content after all. They pay $1.50 per 1,000 views. Basically what it boils down to is that high view, low earnings eHow articles would earn more at that flat rate. Which is, sadly, most of them.
a. Such as gaming articles. Those still work best at Brighthub rather than AC, because not only do we get paid by number of views, we also get the $10 advance. However, gaming articles rejected from Brighthub (if any) will just go there.
b. Also, new plan for the Bloons series. How to win for Bloons 1 and 4 are already at eHow and might as well stay there. Bloons 2 and 3 articles can go over to AC. The three-part guide I want to do for Brighthub will still go there if they ever let me into PC Gaming, and then my overall index to everything will be at AC as well.
c. The main Dragon Cave article is going to get copied over to AC under their nonexclusive display-only policy. That article gets a ridiculous number of views, like twice what the electric toothbrush article gets, and yet earns very little (like a third of what electric toothbrush gets). Having it in both places will mean that it competes with itself - but I've already linked everyone at Dragonspam LJ to eHow, and that's where all the links point, so I don't want to remove it. I did tweak up the SEO on it some though.
And speaking of Dragon Cave - there's a lot of search for guides about what egg hatches into what, so I'll be pitching to write a guide at Brighthub next month too. (Right after I pitch my Restaurant City ingredients guide that I'd also like to write; unless I write that this month if genetics falls through).
4. The other big thing I want to do for gaming is a series about Emperor: RotMK. The main con is that it's an older game, out since 2003. I'll probably have to prove that people search about it. However, I've been playing it a LOT lately, and want to write "how to set up housing right at the start", "how to set up trade", and "how to take care of menagerie animals." I could also do a review article, or an overall intro to the game kind of guide article (or several).
My first choice would be to put this up at Brighthub, if I get into PC Gaming. Failing that, Associated Content.
5. Any science article rejects are still planned for Google Knol so far. Though I've also looked at HubPages, which Robert likes. I'm kind of on the fence so far, and probably won't decide until/unless Brighthub actually rejects something. They haven't so far.
6. And speaking of Knol. I really, really should get around to Mandarin Teaching Alphabet to start myself off there. (Then again, there are a couple eHows I've had on my list for over a year - grid method on Robert's Celtic bird, and "how to eat healthy" which should do well at a place like eHow). (Plus I need to update my "how to make money online" article, even though it doesn't make any actual money.)
So, lots to do. And it's good to have a plan. Of course, so far I'm just doing the procrastination part of the proceedings. But I'll get going eventually...
2009/10/17
Dragonfly revisited
Back at the beginning of the year, I vowed to actually finish something and submit it for publication somewhere. Then it somehow got to be October while I wasn't looking. o.O So I picked the shortest of my WIPs, Dragonfly. It's a piece of literary fiction based on a series of dreams I had back in February of 2005. I wrote most of it back then, then revised it in the summer of 2006, then got a crit pointing out that it needed more work before it was a coherent story, which stalled me back out again for a good long while while I tried to figure out what I was really trying to say with it.
I finally finished it on the 15th. Most of it what it needed was already there from when I was spinning my wheels, I just needed to smooth it out and add a few extra lines here and there to make it complete. And now it is. :) My current plan is to submit it to Glimmer Train. That was the place I was going to submit it in 2006 too, so it makes sense to start there. They have a Short Story Award for New Writers contest that opens in November. If that doesn't turn out to be a good fit, I found a bunch of other places on Duotrope to try.
I don't normally read or write literary fiction at all, so this will probably be my only foray in that direction.
Next up on the list of things to finish: Bus. We'll see if that happens, which depends quite a lot on how next week's job interview turns out. The job would be for January to mid-May, and if I get it, I'm going to need to do a lot of packing and moving. One option would be to leave most of my stuff here (they provide housing), then come back in May to move out officially when the lease ends in June. More financially sound but also more logistically complicated would be to break lease and move 95% of my stuff into a storage place in Indiana, stay with my mother before the job, then find somewhere to live after (preferably by lining up the next job). Either way, I should pack up as much as possible (that is, pack up at a faster rate than what I'm currently doing).
Of course, if I don't get the job, then I'll just keep doing what I've been doing, and I'll look at Bus. It's second shortest, weighing in at around 25k words, and there's only a chapter or two more to write.
I finally finished it on the 15th. Most of it what it needed was already there from when I was spinning my wheels, I just needed to smooth it out and add a few extra lines here and there to make it complete. And now it is. :) My current plan is to submit it to Glimmer Train. That was the place I was going to submit it in 2006 too, so it makes sense to start there. They have a Short Story Award for New Writers contest that opens in November. If that doesn't turn out to be a good fit, I found a bunch of other places on Duotrope to try.
I don't normally read or write literary fiction at all, so this will probably be my only foray in that direction.
Next up on the list of things to finish: Bus. We'll see if that happens, which depends quite a lot on how next week's job interview turns out. The job would be for January to mid-May, and if I get it, I'm going to need to do a lot of packing and moving. One option would be to leave most of my stuff here (they provide housing), then come back in May to move out officially when the lease ends in June. More financially sound but also more logistically complicated would be to break lease and move 95% of my stuff into a storage place in Indiana, stay with my mother before the job, then find somewhere to live after (preferably by lining up the next job). Either way, I should pack up as much as possible (that is, pack up at a faster rate than what I'm currently doing).
Of course, if I don't get the job, then I'll just keep doing what I've been doing, and I'll look at Bus. It's second shortest, weighing in at around 25k words, and there's only a chapter or two more to write.
2007/01/11
Beginning of the New Year: State of the Union (or at least my Writing Life)
Well, Zette's class is off to a rousing good start. So far, for the first week's assignment, we just needed to post up 50-100 words describing an idea. Here's mine:
Obviously I decided against the plot I mentioned in my last entry (though I might use it for something else later on). The above idea came to me last summer, while we had two visiting scientists on campus, one from Japan and one from Norway. They were both here for several months and they'd brought their families. They each had sons that spent a lot of time playing together.
I came up with the idea, didn't really know where to go with it from there, and filed it away. It occurred to me that Zette's class would be a perfect place to try to develop it, since I'm not doing anything much with it anyhow, and it's very different from everything else I'm doing.
Meanwhile, I wrote 992 words last night toward Amulet I. Since Nanowrimo ended I've managed to come up with around 4500 new words, mostly in fits and starts as the mood moves me. The good news is that the mood moves me rather more often than for either of my previous Nanowrimo novels. I've barely looked at Amulet II since Nanowrimo 2005 ended, and I'm holding off on any more fiddling with Temple (as well as Janis) until after Amulet I is done, and the setting ... umm, settles. Right now it's about as solid and stable as quicksand. Every time a character sneezes, it turns out I need to do more worldbuilding and change things around. (Note: no characters have ever actually sneezed in any of my efforts thus far. Hmm. Maybe someone should.)
As for Stranger on a Bus, it's still languishing on the backburner. I've decided that the next scene will involve a blizzard, however. So far I've managed to go ten chapters without any whiteout driving conditions; I need to "fix" that.
[members-only cut]
Then there's Dragonfly. I needed to get far enough away from it before I could figure out what it meant. Eight months later, here I am.
The main problem I struggled with is that, looking just at the framework of the actual story, what I have is a choice between death and death. So the question was: what's the difference?
That's not what the story is about though. What we have is a man that is bored (and boring), because from his view, he's sitting there waiting while nothing much happens. Ultimately his existence is meaningless. As far as he can tell, nothing much will ever happen, there will never be anything but the waiting, and eventually at some point it will end.
Then a dragonfly comes and shows him that there is a different way. That there is a place with meaning, and it's over a line that he didn't know about before.
Once he knew it was there, he had to make the decision to cross it. He knows that there's a lot to explore on the other side, and elephants to find, but he can't see them without crossing the line - he has to trust that they are there. It's a leap of faith that he has to take.
So it's not a choice between death and death. It's about either staying still and dying where he is, or crossing over and transcending into new life.
This is a metaphor that I've been discussing with my brother for a long time now. Life is like a holodeck. Everything is illusory on the inside, which means that everything is ultimately meaningless. But there's an outside to the holodeck. It's a scary place, and you can't know what's out there unless you actually leave. There's only so much information you can gather about the outside from the inside, and at some point there's nothing left to do but to actually go there and see.
My brother is still stuck in that holodeck. I took a leap of faith and crossed over. My dragonfly was a young girl named Dana who came along in 2002 and dragged me out of an abyss. The line appeared while we roleplayed. And now I know what's on the outside, but I can't show him. He demands proof that there's meaning and wondrous elephants. But he has to come over on his own.
How to convey all that in Dragonfly though. I could take the easy way out and make that playground more significant instead. Give the man a choice - get well and be able to go out to the playground with the laughing children, or die and be able to explore the other side of the line and find the elephants.
Hmm. I guess I'm still not really sure what the elephants mean. Memory would be the obvious thing. But memory of what?
Also, why a dragonfly? I think I know the answer to that one, though whether it's relevant to the story remains to be seen. My grandfather was born in a dragon year (Chinese zodiac). In early 2004 we all had to fly out to see him because he'd collapsed and everyone figured he was about to die. He was on a respirator when I got there; he'd survived tuberculosis several decades earlier, but it permanently damaged his lungs. When I went to hold his hand, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. After that he made a miraculous recovery, and not long after I left, he was able to go home. There's a bit more to that than I'm saying, but I think that's where the dragonfly came from.
I guess my grandfather, being a grandfather, would have a lot of memories. Hmmm.
So that's where I am with that.
Two young boys from different nations played together as children when their families met while stationed in a third nation. Fifty years later, their nations are at war with each other, and they meet again as emissaries for peace. Can they draw on their shared childhood to find common ground?
Obviously I decided against the plot I mentioned in my last entry (though I might use it for something else later on). The above idea came to me last summer, while we had two visiting scientists on campus, one from Japan and one from Norway. They were both here for several months and they'd brought their families. They each had sons that spent a lot of time playing together.
I came up with the idea, didn't really know where to go with it from there, and filed it away. It occurred to me that Zette's class would be a perfect place to try to develop it, since I'm not doing anything much with it anyhow, and it's very different from everything else I'm doing.
Meanwhile, I wrote 992 words last night toward Amulet I. Since Nanowrimo ended I've managed to come up with around 4500 new words, mostly in fits and starts as the mood moves me. The good news is that the mood moves me rather more often than for either of my previous Nanowrimo novels. I've barely looked at Amulet II since Nanowrimo 2005 ended, and I'm holding off on any more fiddling with Temple (as well as Janis) until after Amulet I is done, and the setting ... umm, settles. Right now it's about as solid and stable as quicksand. Every time a character sneezes, it turns out I need to do more worldbuilding and change things around. (Note: no characters have ever actually sneezed in any of my efforts thus far. Hmm. Maybe someone should.)
As for Stranger on a Bus, it's still languishing on the backburner. I've decided that the next scene will involve a blizzard, however. So far I've managed to go ten chapters without any whiteout driving conditions; I need to "fix" that.
[members-only cut]
Then there's Dragonfly. I needed to get far enough away from it before I could figure out what it meant. Eight months later, here I am.
The main problem I struggled with is that, looking just at the framework of the actual story, what I have is a choice between death and death. So the question was: what's the difference?
That's not what the story is about though. What we have is a man that is bored (and boring), because from his view, he's sitting there waiting while nothing much happens. Ultimately his existence is meaningless. As far as he can tell, nothing much will ever happen, there will never be anything but the waiting, and eventually at some point it will end.
Then a dragonfly comes and shows him that there is a different way. That there is a place with meaning, and it's over a line that he didn't know about before.
Once he knew it was there, he had to make the decision to cross it. He knows that there's a lot to explore on the other side, and elephants to find, but he can't see them without crossing the line - he has to trust that they are there. It's a leap of faith that he has to take.
So it's not a choice between death and death. It's about either staying still and dying where he is, or crossing over and transcending into new life.
This is a metaphor that I've been discussing with my brother for a long time now. Life is like a holodeck. Everything is illusory on the inside, which means that everything is ultimately meaningless. But there's an outside to the holodeck. It's a scary place, and you can't know what's out there unless you actually leave. There's only so much information you can gather about the outside from the inside, and at some point there's nothing left to do but to actually go there and see.
My brother is still stuck in that holodeck. I took a leap of faith and crossed over. My dragonfly was a young girl named Dana who came along in 2002 and dragged me out of an abyss. The line appeared while we roleplayed. And now I know what's on the outside, but I can't show him. He demands proof that there's meaning and wondrous elephants. But he has to come over on his own.
How to convey all that in Dragonfly though. I could take the easy way out and make that playground more significant instead. Give the man a choice - get well and be able to go out to the playground with the laughing children, or die and be able to explore the other side of the line and find the elephants.
Hmm. I guess I'm still not really sure what the elephants mean. Memory would be the obvious thing. But memory of what?
Also, why a dragonfly? I think I know the answer to that one, though whether it's relevant to the story remains to be seen. My grandfather was born in a dragon year (Chinese zodiac). In early 2004 we all had to fly out to see him because he'd collapsed and everyone figured he was about to die. He was on a respirator when I got there; he'd survived tuberculosis several decades earlier, but it permanently damaged his lungs. When I went to hold his hand, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. After that he made a miraculous recovery, and not long after I left, he was able to go home. There's a bit more to that than I'm saying, but I think that's where the dragonfly came from.
I guess my grandfather, being a grandfather, would have a lot of memories. Hmmm.
So that's where I am with that.
2006/06/27
Musings
Dragonfly. Elephants. Memories.
"Hello. Are you still chasing the memories in shadows? Some stay young, some grow old. Come alive. There are thoughts unclear you can never hide."
Shinedown's I Dare You is turning out to be the story of my life for the past five years.
What are my elephants? What memories lurk in the shade of those trees? I never saw any. And I am not sure that I know. Perhaps at some point they will come out into the light. They probably are already, and I just haven't spotted them yet as the elephants that they are.
I think this is the point where fiction departs from me. I can think of ways to tell a story about the old man with the dragonfly and the wall, and a life and memories that I can create for him. It won't be a true story anymore, but it would be more meaningful to other people and have more impact as a story.
In the meantime, I've been ruminating on what I want to do with my What is it to be Human? story. (That's not the title of my story; that's the game title. I don't know what my title is yet.) My basic premise is that Craig will come into the city pursuing a different target. Said target turns out to be someone important to the master of the city, who isn't so keen on letting Craig take them out. And so Craig gets to work out a deal with the master, wherein he has to perform some sort of complex task that only a vampire hunter can do well - and if he does a good enough job, the master will reward him with the target. Rumen, as the master's second, is assigned to work with Craig. And so as they work together, Craig and Rumen get to know each other. Eventually when they're friends, the truth comes out of their shared past. Mayhem ensues. I don't know how they will react when the story gets to that point; it kind of depends on what happens before, which I won't know until I write it.
And as I'm thinking this over, I'm noticing that this bears a striking resemblance to Taint. Same general setup. Thomas - who hates vampires even though he is one - finds himself trespassing in King Stranahan's city, and is forced to become Jacob's stepchilde. Jacob and Thomas get to know each other and eventually become friends. Of course, in Taint, they stay friends... and also there's nothing sinister about Jacob at all.
I've also noticed that the two of them aren't exactly cooperating when I attempt to write the first few scenes of this. They're in-character, with the right motivations and actions and all ... but it makes me feel like I'm writing the wrong story. (Actually, come to think of it, Thomas isn't too terribly cooperative with very much of what I've written with him as the focus...).
Other differences ... Rumen is the tragic duality figure in the first story, while that's Thomas in Fortress Launne.
Either way. Somewhere I'd read that we tend to write the same things over and over until we succeed in saying what we need to say. I wonder what I'm trying to say.
"Hello. Are you still chasing the memories in shadows? Some stay young, some grow old. Come alive. There are thoughts unclear you can never hide."
Shinedown's I Dare You is turning out to be the story of my life for the past five years.
What are my elephants? What memories lurk in the shade of those trees? I never saw any. And I am not sure that I know. Perhaps at some point they will come out into the light. They probably are already, and I just haven't spotted them yet as the elephants that they are.
I think this is the point where fiction departs from me. I can think of ways to tell a story about the old man with the dragonfly and the wall, and a life and memories that I can create for him. It won't be a true story anymore, but it would be more meaningful to other people and have more impact as a story.
In the meantime, I've been ruminating on what I want to do with my What is it to be Human? story. (That's not the title of my story; that's the game title. I don't know what my title is yet.) My basic premise is that Craig will come into the city pursuing a different target. Said target turns out to be someone important to the master of the city, who isn't so keen on letting Craig take them out. And so Craig gets to work out a deal with the master, wherein he has to perform some sort of complex task that only a vampire hunter can do well - and if he does a good enough job, the master will reward him with the target. Rumen, as the master's second, is assigned to work with Craig. And so as they work together, Craig and Rumen get to know each other. Eventually when they're friends, the truth comes out of their shared past. Mayhem ensues. I don't know how they will react when the story gets to that point; it kind of depends on what happens before, which I won't know until I write it.
And as I'm thinking this over, I'm noticing that this bears a striking resemblance to Taint. Same general setup. Thomas - who hates vampires even though he is one - finds himself trespassing in King Stranahan's city, and is forced to become Jacob's stepchilde. Jacob and Thomas get to know each other and eventually become friends. Of course, in Taint, they stay friends... and also there's nothing sinister about Jacob at all.
I've also noticed that the two of them aren't exactly cooperating when I attempt to write the first few scenes of this. They're in-character, with the right motivations and actions and all ... but it makes me feel like I'm writing the wrong story. (Actually, come to think of it, Thomas isn't too terribly cooperative with very much of what I've written with him as the focus...).
Other differences ... Rumen is the tragic duality figure in the first story, while that's Thomas in Fortress Launne.
Either way. Somewhere I'd read that we tend to write the same things over and over until we succeed in saying what we need to say. I wonder what I'm trying to say.
Comprehensive Update
33 / 90 days to go | 57 / 90 days gone
32,798 / 90,000 words done | 24,202 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7813
Blogs: 17,658
Hmmm. Time just keeps slipping on by. Nearly two months into SFR, I'm 24k words behind, and I'm not likely to make a comeback anytime soon. Maybe after my friend's visit, which is creeping up on me a lot faster than I'd like. She's going to be here next week! :o
On the bright side, I cleaned most of two bathrooms. :) Both toilets are done now, at least as done as they can get. (Anyone have any clue how to get rid of ring-around-the-toilet?) I cleaned the worst of the three sinks, and I'd cleaned the tub and other two sinks in recent history so they shouldn't be too bad to do again. Now I'm eyeing the kitchen. I'm thinking baby steps there, too. Maybe if I just do one section of counter at a time and hope that I'm on enough of a roll by the end to do the fridge... The hard part is just moving stuff out of the way so I can get underneath things. The stovetop isn't too bad at the moment (I clean that off a lot more often than elsewhere).
Then there's vacuuming everywhere else, tossing a ton of paper-type things (mostly junk mail), hiding the rest in my pantry or something ... maybe some dusting. Also laundry; I need to wash all the comforters, which means lugging them down to a laundromat with a big enough washer and dryer, spending lots of quarters.
My friend isn't going to be here that long, and we're going to be out sightseeing for a lot of it, so hopefully she won't have time to notice anything I miss.
Yeah, okay, so I'm a total slob. At least nobody has to look at it most of the time besides me.
[members-only cut]
After the visit, though, it should be clear sailing through the rest of July. I have so many writing projects going on it's starting to get confusing. So ... a list:
1. Dragonfly. In light of ellsea's excellent critique, I now have a lot more of a clue what I need to do with it.
The whole thing was based on a couple of dreams, which is why it looks like a bunch of weakly connected fragments. But I know what it means to me. It's about my friend (the one that's visiting soon, actually), and how she pulled me out of the abyss I was in when we met. I was sitting around waiting to die, and she showed me life. Then last year (when I had the dream), our paths had already diverged though neither of us were quite ready to admit it yet; she had her own life to lead, her own errands to keep, and she couldn't forever stay. And so I had to let her go, and go on without her. But I didn't die. I guess it's more like an ascension than a death (if anyone here follows Stargate). I guess in some ways, she brought me to the wall but I had to cross it by myself.
I still don't know what the elephants mean, though. That whole thing was kind of nebulous. The way I wrote it, that was the way it happened in the dream. I looked over the wall and knew there were elephants, and there were signs of their habitation, but we didn't actually see any of them.
Hmmm. It's a lot like other animals in my dreams. The kind that lurk. Crocodiles hanging from trees by their tails, for example; that was in a dream several years ago. They were menacing with very sharp teeth, and I was afraid to pass them, even though that was the way I needed to go. Perhaps it's time to look up elephants in ye olde dream dictionary and see what they're supposed to mean...
(ten minutes later)
Elephants: strength, power, long memory; sometimes the ability to forgive and forget.
Domestic animals: a part of your animal nature that has been domesticated or tamed, i.e. integrated into your personality.
Hmmmmm. Think I'm going to need to sleep on that one. There's what that part of the dream means to me personally, and then there's working in the dream dictionary version into Dragonfly (if what it means to me personally turns out to be incompatible).
Either way, I ought to reread this whole book. It's Interpreting Your Dreams by W. Lindsay Jacob, M.D. It's a paperback I picked up decades ago, I have no clue where, but somehow everything it says seems to be spot-on for me. I've looked through other dream-related books before, but didn't like any of them as much as this one.
2. Stranger on a Bus. I started editting Chapter 1, and I basically know what rough spots need revising in it. The hard part is done; that was the first four paragraphs which got completely rewritten into three paragraphs that somehow managed to have more total words. As most people have commented, my first draft is remarkably clean overall, so most of it should just be light editting. I'm hoping once I get back into this, it'll go fairly quickly, and then I can get back to figuring out how to end Chapter 10.
3. Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout. I haven't written anything new for this one recently. Still one more lengthy setup post, and then I want to dump out a whole bunch of accumulated thoughts from the past couple months. Strangely, I didn't have anything noteworthy thoughts last weekend. Maybe my brain is pausing for me to catch up.
4. Fortress Launne. That's kind of a gigantic chunk that's all related. I have lots of ruminations going on all the time, thinking about my characters and plotting their dooms and such. ;) Most of it is just scattered stray thoughts that I don't write down.
4a. Temple. The opening scene needs a lot of work. Something C_Wolfe said in Writing Jam is kicking some gears into motion, though. Maybe if I ditched the first full paragraph entirely, or somehow found somewhere farther down to move it, and put the intro to Chance up top...
4b. Amulet II. I still need to finish the second half of this one. But it'll take a lot of immersion to get back into it, as the plot was a gargantuan tangled mass.
4c. Birthright. The more of these I write, the more clear and straightforward I seem to get. Birthright is going to be so simple compared to the first two. It'll follow a girl as she discovers everything along with the readers. Hopefully I won't need to sneak in infodumps much at all. And when I think about eventual marketing, Birthright would probably be the first one that ought to go out.
4d. Everything Else. I think about the original seed of the whole venture, Aliacorba Thomas Cougar. I listen to I Dare You by Shinedown, over and over, and he's speaking to me through them. "Even in madness I know you still believe. Paint me on canvas so I become what you could never be." And I do still believe. No matter how much doubt keeps sneaking up on me. And I will write him down so he becomes greater than me.
5. What is it to be Human? Rumen hasn't abandoned me. I see glimmers of him in my posts for other characters that are cut from the same archetype.
In his past, Rumen lost his first human servant to a vampire hunter - and for revenge he killed that hunter and the hunter's entire family line. When I made Craig Turner, a Hunter: the Reckoning character, for a different game, I used that plot thread; Craig was the only survivor of that line. I have some ideas baking about having him turn up in the same city and confronting Rumen. It might make for an interesting story of undetermined length.
The game itself is still dead. The GM doesn't seem to think so, but there's only three of us even looking anymore - me, him, and one other who is so swamped with Real Life that she barely has time to run her own game. I loved that game, but I'm thinking it's time to move on.
6. Roleplay. As usual, I'm being way too slow about updating my game. I have lots of scattered ruminative thoughts about that one, too. Mainly involving the mage backstory, which is going to get tangled up with some of what the wolves are currently doing. And some of which I need to pin down before I write the next round of posts. Like with every other writing task lately, though, it's going slowly. My players aren't being too terribly fast either, though, and the vampire side of things seems to have died entirely.
I'm mostly keeping up in my other games. Two of the Dante games are moving along pretty fast, and there's a third where I need to post. (Dante being my favorite GM on rpol; I've mentioned him a number of times in these blogs before. Dante is his GMing name, not his real name.)
32,798 / 90,000 words done | 24,202 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7813
Blogs: 17,658
Hmmm. Time just keeps slipping on by. Nearly two months into SFR, I'm 24k words behind, and I'm not likely to make a comeback anytime soon. Maybe after my friend's visit, which is creeping up on me a lot faster than I'd like. She's going to be here next week! :o
On the bright side, I cleaned most of two bathrooms. :) Both toilets are done now, at least as done as they can get. (Anyone have any clue how to get rid of ring-around-the-toilet?) I cleaned the worst of the three sinks, and I'd cleaned the tub and other two sinks in recent history so they shouldn't be too bad to do again. Now I'm eyeing the kitchen. I'm thinking baby steps there, too. Maybe if I just do one section of counter at a time and hope that I'm on enough of a roll by the end to do the fridge... The hard part is just moving stuff out of the way so I can get underneath things. The stovetop isn't too bad at the moment (I clean that off a lot more often than elsewhere).
Then there's vacuuming everywhere else, tossing a ton of paper-type things (mostly junk mail), hiding the rest in my pantry or something ... maybe some dusting. Also laundry; I need to wash all the comforters, which means lugging them down to a laundromat with a big enough washer and dryer, spending lots of quarters.
My friend isn't going to be here that long, and we're going to be out sightseeing for a lot of it, so hopefully she won't have time to notice anything I miss.
Yeah, okay, so I'm a total slob. At least nobody has to look at it most of the time besides me.
[members-only cut]
After the visit, though, it should be clear sailing through the rest of July. I have so many writing projects going on it's starting to get confusing. So ... a list:
1. Dragonfly. In light of ellsea's excellent critique, I now have a lot more of a clue what I need to do with it.
The whole thing was based on a couple of dreams, which is why it looks like a bunch of weakly connected fragments. But I know what it means to me. It's about my friend (the one that's visiting soon, actually), and how she pulled me out of the abyss I was in when we met. I was sitting around waiting to die, and she showed me life. Then last year (when I had the dream), our paths had already diverged though neither of us were quite ready to admit it yet; she had her own life to lead, her own errands to keep, and she couldn't forever stay. And so I had to let her go, and go on without her. But I didn't die. I guess it's more like an ascension than a death (if anyone here follows Stargate). I guess in some ways, she brought me to the wall but I had to cross it by myself.
I still don't know what the elephants mean, though. That whole thing was kind of nebulous. The way I wrote it, that was the way it happened in the dream. I looked over the wall and knew there were elephants, and there were signs of their habitation, but we didn't actually see any of them.
Hmmm. It's a lot like other animals in my dreams. The kind that lurk. Crocodiles hanging from trees by their tails, for example; that was in a dream several years ago. They were menacing with very sharp teeth, and I was afraid to pass them, even though that was the way I needed to go. Perhaps it's time to look up elephants in ye olde dream dictionary and see what they're supposed to mean...
(ten minutes later)
Elephants: strength, power, long memory; sometimes the ability to forgive and forget.
Domestic animals: a part of your animal nature that has been domesticated or tamed, i.e. integrated into your personality.
Hmmmmm. Think I'm going to need to sleep on that one. There's what that part of the dream means to me personally, and then there's working in the dream dictionary version into Dragonfly (if what it means to me personally turns out to be incompatible).
Either way, I ought to reread this whole book. It's Interpreting Your Dreams by W. Lindsay Jacob, M.D. It's a paperback I picked up decades ago, I have no clue where, but somehow everything it says seems to be spot-on for me. I've looked through other dream-related books before, but didn't like any of them as much as this one.
2. Stranger on a Bus. I started editting Chapter 1, and I basically know what rough spots need revising in it. The hard part is done; that was the first four paragraphs which got completely rewritten into three paragraphs that somehow managed to have more total words. As most people have commented, my first draft is remarkably clean overall, so most of it should just be light editting. I'm hoping once I get back into this, it'll go fairly quickly, and then I can get back to figuring out how to end Chapter 10.
3. Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout. I haven't written anything new for this one recently. Still one more lengthy setup post, and then I want to dump out a whole bunch of accumulated thoughts from the past couple months. Strangely, I didn't have anything noteworthy thoughts last weekend. Maybe my brain is pausing for me to catch up.
4. Fortress Launne. That's kind of a gigantic chunk that's all related. I have lots of ruminations going on all the time, thinking about my characters and plotting their dooms and such. ;) Most of it is just scattered stray thoughts that I don't write down.
4a. Temple. The opening scene needs a lot of work. Something C_Wolfe said in Writing Jam is kicking some gears into motion, though. Maybe if I ditched the first full paragraph entirely, or somehow found somewhere farther down to move it, and put the intro to Chance up top...
4b. Amulet II. I still need to finish the second half of this one. But it'll take a lot of immersion to get back into it, as the plot was a gargantuan tangled mass.
4c. Birthright. The more of these I write, the more clear and straightforward I seem to get. Birthright is going to be so simple compared to the first two. It'll follow a girl as she discovers everything along with the readers. Hopefully I won't need to sneak in infodumps much at all. And when I think about eventual marketing, Birthright would probably be the first one that ought to go out.
4d. Everything Else. I think about the original seed of the whole venture, Aliacorba Thomas Cougar. I listen to I Dare You by Shinedown, over and over, and he's speaking to me through them. "Even in madness I know you still believe. Paint me on canvas so I become what you could never be." And I do still believe. No matter how much doubt keeps sneaking up on me. And I will write him down so he becomes greater than me.
5. What is it to be Human? Rumen hasn't abandoned me. I see glimmers of him in my posts for other characters that are cut from the same archetype.
In his past, Rumen lost his first human servant to a vampire hunter - and for revenge he killed that hunter and the hunter's entire family line. When I made Craig Turner, a Hunter: the Reckoning character, for a different game, I used that plot thread; Craig was the only survivor of that line. I have some ideas baking about having him turn up in the same city and confronting Rumen. It might make for an interesting story of undetermined length.
The game itself is still dead. The GM doesn't seem to think so, but there's only three of us even looking anymore - me, him, and one other who is so swamped with Real Life that she barely has time to run her own game. I loved that game, but I'm thinking it's time to move on.
6. Roleplay. As usual, I'm being way too slow about updating my game. I have lots of scattered ruminative thoughts about that one, too. Mainly involving the mage backstory, which is going to get tangled up with some of what the wolves are currently doing. And some of which I need to pin down before I write the next round of posts. Like with every other writing task lately, though, it's going slowly. My players aren't being too terribly fast either, though, and the vampire side of things seems to have died entirely.
I'm mostly keeping up in my other games. Two of the Dante games are moving along pretty fast, and there's a third where I need to post. (Dante being my favorite GM on rpol; I've mentioned him a number of times in these blogs before. Dante is his GMing name, not his real name.)
2006/06/14
SFR nearly halfway point
46 / 90 days to go | 44 / 90 days gone
25,373 / 90,000 words done | 18,627 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 13,237
My Internet connection at home is a bit kablooey at the moment. Everything is loading at a glacial pace. (So much for their ads proclaiming "6 megs of speed." Hah! I'm looking at speeds more along the lines of 60-600 bytes.) I couldn't get the profile thing at SFFMuse to let me update it there. Here's hoping this will actually post here.
So what's on my writing plate at the moment?
Dragonfly started out at 898 after the first round of tweakage, then went up to 925 briefly, and finally settled in at 916. I'll look at again in another week or two to see if I still like it the way it is now. Then it's off to the submissions with it as soon as July comes around. I'm waiting for July because that way I can submit it to Glimmer Train under two different categories at once. (It's allowed.) Might as well see if they like it enough to buy it, even if it isn't good enough to win the annual competition. Both ways pay relatively well. I won't hear back from them until October, though. Of course, that'll give me a lot of time to look at other literary fiction places to submit if they don't like it there.
Next, Stranger on a Bus is up for some line editting, starting from the beginning. I'm reading over the critiques that Spiff gave it back last September, when I first posted it at SFFMuse. I have a hardcopy of it floating around here somewhere and will probably draw red ink all over it for the first pass, then type it all back in by hand. Hopefully I'll manage to do a chapter per night until I'm done with the first nine chapters. Meanwhile I'll post up what I have of 10 (for backup purposes if nothing else), in case anyone is still following along and wants the latest and greatest. (assuming my Internet cooperates. *sigh*)
Also, Amulet II is up for a reread, outlining, and hopefully finishing. I left off at 55k words back in November. At that point I discovered that the end of my outline was not the end of the story after all, but was somewhere around the middle. So I still have to write the other half. But before I can do that, I need to rewrite the outline. It's a story with two major plotlines and four(ish) minor ones, which means it's fairly complex; at the time I stopped in November, it was getting rather unwieldy. There were lots of holes developing, and I'll need to fill them before I can move forward.
Temple is still on the backburner as well, but at the moment I cringe too much when I look at the opening material. At some point I do need to get back to writing up the second full draft, though.
Then there's Birthright coming up for next Nano. I have lots of backstory material in mind for the main plotline, though none of it is fleshed out enough yet. I need to outline the second plotline as well, since at this point it consists of a one-paragraph blurb. So far it's looking like this will be even more straightforward of a plot than Amulet II was. The main protagonist will be discovering all the info at the same time as the readers. The secondary protagonist, of the other plotline, will be in a similar situation, I think. The scary part is that I have no real idea of how it ends. I know what I'd like to see happen at the end, but have no clue how it's going to get there.
Taint/Amulet I is just going to stay a pile of scattered scenes for now. Maybe I'll write more of them as my secondary project for Nano, the way I did last November when I was stalled out on Amulet II.
As for roleplay, it's deader than a doornail. I have exactly one active player in my game, but he can't move because there's four other people who aren't around much. There are two posts I need to make as a player but haven't worked up the energy for it yet. There's one dead game that's scheduled to be removed from my list next week (I give most games one month to come back to life before I remove them). All the other games are basically dead as well, though there are occasional signs that they might revive.
That pretty much sums up where I am at the moment. Now it's time to hit the "post" button to see if this will actually post...
...
(it wouldn't go until 12 hours after I wrote it. Grrrr.)
25,373 / 90,000 words done | 18,627 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 13,237
My Internet connection at home is a bit kablooey at the moment. Everything is loading at a glacial pace. (So much for their ads proclaiming "6 megs of speed." Hah! I'm looking at speeds more along the lines of 60-600 bytes.) I couldn't get the profile thing at SFFMuse to let me update it there. Here's hoping this will actually post here.
So what's on my writing plate at the moment?
Dragonfly started out at 898 after the first round of tweakage, then went up to 925 briefly, and finally settled in at 916. I'll look at again in another week or two to see if I still like it the way it is now. Then it's off to the submissions with it as soon as July comes around. I'm waiting for July because that way I can submit it to Glimmer Train under two different categories at once. (It's allowed.) Might as well see if they like it enough to buy it, even if it isn't good enough to win the annual competition. Both ways pay relatively well. I won't hear back from them until October, though. Of course, that'll give me a lot of time to look at other literary fiction places to submit if they don't like it there.
Next, Stranger on a Bus is up for some line editting, starting from the beginning. I'm reading over the critiques that Spiff gave it back last September, when I first posted it at SFFMuse. I have a hardcopy of it floating around here somewhere and will probably draw red ink all over it for the first pass, then type it all back in by hand. Hopefully I'll manage to do a chapter per night until I'm done with the first nine chapters. Meanwhile I'll post up what I have of 10 (for backup purposes if nothing else), in case anyone is still following along and wants the latest and greatest. (assuming my Internet cooperates. *sigh*)
Also, Amulet II is up for a reread, outlining, and hopefully finishing. I left off at 55k words back in November. At that point I discovered that the end of my outline was not the end of the story after all, but was somewhere around the middle. So I still have to write the other half. But before I can do that, I need to rewrite the outline. It's a story with two major plotlines and four(ish) minor ones, which means it's fairly complex; at the time I stopped in November, it was getting rather unwieldy. There were lots of holes developing, and I'll need to fill them before I can move forward.
Temple is still on the backburner as well, but at the moment I cringe too much when I look at the opening material. At some point I do need to get back to writing up the second full draft, though.
Then there's Birthright coming up for next Nano. I have lots of backstory material in mind for the main plotline, though none of it is fleshed out enough yet. I need to outline the second plotline as well, since at this point it consists of a one-paragraph blurb. So far it's looking like this will be even more straightforward of a plot than Amulet II was. The main protagonist will be discovering all the info at the same time as the readers. The secondary protagonist, of the other plotline, will be in a similar situation, I think. The scary part is that I have no real idea of how it ends. I know what I'd like to see happen at the end, but have no clue how it's going to get there.
Taint/Amulet I is just going to stay a pile of scattered scenes for now. Maybe I'll write more of them as my secondary project for Nano, the way I did last November when I was stalled out on Amulet II.
As for roleplay, it's deader than a doornail. I have exactly one active player in my game, but he can't move because there's four other people who aren't around much. There are two posts I need to make as a player but haven't worked up the energy for it yet. There's one dead game that's scheduled to be removed from my list next week (I give most games one month to come back to life before I remove them). All the other games are basically dead as well, though there are occasional signs that they might revive.
That pretty much sums up where I am at the moment. Now it's time to hit the "post" button to see if this will actually post...
...
(it wouldn't go until 12 hours after I wrote it. Grrrr.)
2006/06/13
I heard a fly buzz when I died
I spent last night tweaking up Dragonfly (again). I won't inflict it on the rest of you here (again), as this is a place for speculative fiction, not literary fiction, and the piece is still the epitomy of passivity and navel gazing. ;) It says what it needs to say to me, though.
Final wordcount is 917 words. Somewhere I read that if I'm turning my commas into periods in the morning, then turning them back into commas in the afternoon, it means it's ready to go. I'm at that state of tweakage now. I might show it to a few people who appreciate literary fiction if I can find any before July.
It's always odd to me how that works out. I don't like to read what I tend to write. Fortress Launne is best classified as fantasy, and there's very little fantasy that I enjoy reading. I don't particularly care about other people's renditions of classical music but greatly enjoy playing it. Maybe I'm just a narcissist, in love with my own creations to the exclusion of everyone else's. But then again, I also greatly enjoy listening to all sorts of music that I haven't a clue how to create, and the things I enjoy reading are the types of things I wouldn't ever think to write. In the latter case, in recent times anyway, that would be nonfiction science-related articles in things like Discover Magazine, Smithsonian, Science News, etc. I'm a scientist, and I have no inspiration to write any of the articles in the magazines I most enjoy reading. Meanwhile my reaction to most fiction magazines (the types of places I'm likely to attempt to submit stuff in the future) leaves me "ehh" for actually reading.
Anyway, back to Dragonfly. I went and looked up the Emily Dickinson poem that apparently had a much greater influence on the piece than I thought. I'd read it back in high school or somesuch and forgot all but the very first line. In fact, up until I reread it just now, I could've sworn it was an abstract 4-line poem - and not something with 4 stanzas and concrete imagery. And here I thought I didn't much care for Emily Dickinson. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Stranger on a Bus is still stalled out. I've been a bit depressed in the past few days, and this makes it hard to work on things that are high-speed action-adventure. However, I have a friend originally from Russia who gets quite passionate about all things Russian, and I'm planning to inflict him with Chapter 5 (when a band of rogue Russians try to hijack the bus) for his thoughts on cultural accuracy. The names I use for the hijackers are definitely wrong, so hopefully he'll feel inclined to rename everyone involved for me. That should hopefully give me the kick in the pants I need to start line-editting things from the beginning, too, which I need to do before I finish Chapter 10. The last bit of Chapter 10 needs to draw rather heavily from everything that went on in the first nine chapters, and the details are a bit fuzzy since the last time I looked at them back in September.
And finally, yesterday I wrote a blog entry elsewhere about hurricanes. Alberto is hitting Florida right now, on its way up through Savannah GA (where I am) and I felt inclined to wax poetic about my past experiences with hurricanes. After I was done, I noticed that I'd managed to put it into the approximate format for creative nonfiction. I'd spend quite a bit of time looking that up, while pondering the possibilities of a Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout which is kind of tabled at the moment. Apparently stuff sank in that I can use elsewhere, though.
[members-only cut]
I'm putting the full text of the other blog entry here in case anyone is curious. It could use some tweakage but the overall form is right. Thinking about my process while writing it, I kind of wish I'd saved some intermediate stages for my own personal amusement - from the "blurt out a bunch of disjointed thoughts onto the screen" stage to where it is now. I call these things "first drafts" but in retrospect it isn't really, because there's already been a ton of editting gone into it before it sees the light of day. On the other hand, the "blurt it all out" stage could be classified under "prewrite" mode too. Overall, it's not really a process with discrete stages, as everything sort of grades into each other.
Anyway, here it is:
Final wordcount is 917 words. Somewhere I read that if I'm turning my commas into periods in the morning, then turning them back into commas in the afternoon, it means it's ready to go. I'm at that state of tweakage now. I might show it to a few people who appreciate literary fiction if I can find any before July.
It's always odd to me how that works out. I don't like to read what I tend to write. Fortress Launne is best classified as fantasy, and there's very little fantasy that I enjoy reading. I don't particularly care about other people's renditions of classical music but greatly enjoy playing it. Maybe I'm just a narcissist, in love with my own creations to the exclusion of everyone else's. But then again, I also greatly enjoy listening to all sorts of music that I haven't a clue how to create, and the things I enjoy reading are the types of things I wouldn't ever think to write. In the latter case, in recent times anyway, that would be nonfiction science-related articles in things like Discover Magazine, Smithsonian, Science News, etc. I'm a scientist, and I have no inspiration to write any of the articles in the magazines I most enjoy reading. Meanwhile my reaction to most fiction magazines (the types of places I'm likely to attempt to submit stuff in the future) leaves me "ehh" for actually reading.
Anyway, back to Dragonfly. I went and looked up the Emily Dickinson poem that apparently had a much greater influence on the piece than I thought. I'd read it back in high school or somesuch and forgot all but the very first line. In fact, up until I reread it just now, I could've sworn it was an abstract 4-line poem - and not something with 4 stanzas and concrete imagery. And here I thought I didn't much care for Emily Dickinson. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Stranger on a Bus is still stalled out. I've been a bit depressed in the past few days, and this makes it hard to work on things that are high-speed action-adventure. However, I have a friend originally from Russia who gets quite passionate about all things Russian, and I'm planning to inflict him with Chapter 5 (when a band of rogue Russians try to hijack the bus) for his thoughts on cultural accuracy. The names I use for the hijackers are definitely wrong, so hopefully he'll feel inclined to rename everyone involved for me. That should hopefully give me the kick in the pants I need to start line-editting things from the beginning, too, which I need to do before I finish Chapter 10. The last bit of Chapter 10 needs to draw rather heavily from everything that went on in the first nine chapters, and the details are a bit fuzzy since the last time I looked at them back in September.
And finally, yesterday I wrote a blog entry elsewhere about hurricanes. Alberto is hitting Florida right now, on its way up through Savannah GA (where I am) and I felt inclined to wax poetic about my past experiences with hurricanes. After I was done, I noticed that I'd managed to put it into the approximate format for creative nonfiction. I'd spend quite a bit of time looking that up, while pondering the possibilities of a Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout which is kind of tabled at the moment. Apparently stuff sank in that I can use elsewhere, though.
[members-only cut]
I'm putting the full text of the other blog entry here in case anyone is curious. It could use some tweakage but the overall form is right. Thinking about my process while writing it, I kind of wish I'd saved some intermediate stages for my own personal amusement - from the "blurt out a bunch of disjointed thoughts onto the screen" stage to where it is now. I call these things "first drafts" but in retrospect it isn't really, because there's already been a ton of editting gone into it before it sees the light of day. On the other hand, the "blurt it all out" stage could be classified under "prewrite" mode too. Overall, it's not really a process with discrete stages, as everything sort of grades into each other.
Anyway, here it is:
Later tonight, Alberto will hit Florida. First tropical storm of the 2006 hurricane season. Possibly a weak category 1 by the time it makes landfall. Nobody is out trying to catch the big waves this time. They're being sensible and stocking up on supplies, or evacuating. The pall of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma last year, and the quadruple-whammy on Florida in 2004, still hangs over everyone.
My personal experiences with hurricanes have been remarkably uneventful by comparison. I was in Wilmington, NC during the time period when every single Atlantic hurricane seemed intent on making landfall in Wilmington, NC; I missed out on Bertha and Fran of 1996, but was there for Bonnie in 1998, and Dennis and Floyd in 1999. (My best friend at the time saw all five of those, plus he was in Charleston for Hugo in 1988. He figured he was cursed.) In all of those cases, I lived on relatively high ground (as high as one can hope for in a place that's totally flat). There was lots of wind and rain, but no thunder or lightning. And the power was out. Which meant hours upon hours of sitting around in the dark with nothing to do. We saw the eye of Bonnie as it passed right over my apartment complex, on such a slow trek that we were in it for an hour. That was about as exciting as things ever got.
Hurricanes are rather boring. It's the aftermath that sucks. That's when all the flooding problems start, with all the overflowing rivers. The full impact of a hurricane tends not to be immediately evident, because it isn't so much the downed street signs and power lines as it is when all that extra water starts coming back downstream to get back to the ocean.
Wilmington is in the part of the southeast coast that juts outward, making it a prime target for hurricanes going by. Savannah, GA is in the part of the coast that indents inward, which makes the odds of something hitting here much less. So far since I've lived here, there have been some near-misses, but nothing to cause much alarm.
The projected path of Alberto has it hitting Savannah from behind by Wednesday morning - going over a bunch of land, so it will hopefully just be severe thunderstorms by the time it gets here.
As for the rest of 2006, the hurricane specialists predict another highly active year, though it will be extremely difficult to top last year, which broke an enormous number of records.
Guess we'll see what happens.
2006/06/05
SFR Month 2 Day 5
SFR 2006:
55 / 90 days to go | 35 / 90 days gone
19,243 / 90,000 words done | 15,757 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 440
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,281
Well, after that good start to the month, I went back to doing what I was doing before - nothing. :p No writing, anyhow. Lots of reading of other people's blogs, though. I seem to be drawn to stuff that inspires crippling doubt in my writing abilities, or the paltry sums of money I can look forward to if I wanted to try to make a living off of writing... Lots of things about finding agents and submitting work. Also lots of searching around for various markets. Definitely not going to quit my day job anytime soon.
I guess I'm a bit worried at the rising cost of living, and the corresponding lack of rise in my raises at work. I can't ask for pay raises; it's a soft-money institution, and I'm glad to be employed at all. Lower pay over a longer period of employment is better in the long run for me than higher pay followed by being out of a job when the grant funds run out. I took on the job at the Chinese takeout partly to help compensate, though there has been a lot of rewarding aspects to that gig other than financial. However, in a year or two I'm probably not going to be able to afford to work where I'm working now. Something will have to give. Either I cut expenses (mainly by moving somewhere cheaper and/or going back to having housemates), or I increase income (most likely route would be to get a full-time day job that pays more). In light of that, working harder on writing sellable stuff sounds like the least productive way to go about it, with the slowest return, but it's what I most want to do.
I've tweaked Dragonfly a bit more, expanding one of the middle paragraphs and trying to come up with a good way to expand one of the opening paragraphs to match the closing paragraphs. However, it seems to be true what James Macdonald says about short stories - it's like a pie. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, there's not much you can do except make a new pie. And in the case of Dragonfly, where one of the themes seems to be passivity, there's not really much room to introduce any new ideas into it without weakening what's already there. Oh well. If it gets rejected by all the literary places, at least I'll have had some experience with submitting something (and submissions count for 1k words in SFR).
Roleplay has been pretty dead lately. Even at my glacial pace of writing the posts on my list, I'm still keeping up remarkably well. I've got two other posts left on the list but haven't yet worked up the motivation to do them. Everyone else is busy doing things in Real Life - final exams, crosscountry moves, messy relationship breakups, or work overload.
Meanwhile, I got back into the bus story a bit. Wrote another 440 words tonight. Probably spent more time staring at the screen wondering what to do, and deleting things, than writing. Ned the bus driver was stuck in front of a camera crew, and it took me a while to figure out how to get him away from them, and toward the next exciting part of the chapter - a high speed chase scene. He's now talking to the driver of the armoured car with which they will be doing the speeding, whereupon I stalled out again to look up information about truckers. Tomorrow I'll pick up from there and finally get the scene going (I hope).
I've also been spending a lot of time brainstorming possible nonfiction things I can write. Scenes from Inside a Chinese Takeout being a nice little memoir thing, for one. I can also write stuff about scientific field research, which can certainly have an adventurous angle to it - I've done some fun things as a geologist and marine ecologist, and stuff I've written here about my cruises has certainly managed to entertain people.
Guess that's where I am at the moment. Now I need to get some sleep...
55 / 90 days to go | 35 / 90 days gone
19,243 / 90,000 words done | 15,757 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 440
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,281
Well, after that good start to the month, I went back to doing what I was doing before - nothing. :p No writing, anyhow. Lots of reading of other people's blogs, though. I seem to be drawn to stuff that inspires crippling doubt in my writing abilities, or the paltry sums of money I can look forward to if I wanted to try to make a living off of writing... Lots of things about finding agents and submitting work. Also lots of searching around for various markets. Definitely not going to quit my day job anytime soon.
I guess I'm a bit worried at the rising cost of living, and the corresponding lack of rise in my raises at work. I can't ask for pay raises; it's a soft-money institution, and I'm glad to be employed at all. Lower pay over a longer period of employment is better in the long run for me than higher pay followed by being out of a job when the grant funds run out. I took on the job at the Chinese takeout partly to help compensate, though there has been a lot of rewarding aspects to that gig other than financial. However, in a year or two I'm probably not going to be able to afford to work where I'm working now. Something will have to give. Either I cut expenses (mainly by moving somewhere cheaper and/or going back to having housemates), or I increase income (most likely route would be to get a full-time day job that pays more). In light of that, working harder on writing sellable stuff sounds like the least productive way to go about it, with the slowest return, but it's what I most want to do.
I've tweaked Dragonfly a bit more, expanding one of the middle paragraphs and trying to come up with a good way to expand one of the opening paragraphs to match the closing paragraphs. However, it seems to be true what James Macdonald says about short stories - it's like a pie. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, there's not much you can do except make a new pie. And in the case of Dragonfly, where one of the themes seems to be passivity, there's not really much room to introduce any new ideas into it without weakening what's already there. Oh well. If it gets rejected by all the literary places, at least I'll have had some experience with submitting something (and submissions count for 1k words in SFR).
Roleplay has been pretty dead lately. Even at my glacial pace of writing the posts on my list, I'm still keeping up remarkably well. I've got two other posts left on the list but haven't yet worked up the motivation to do them. Everyone else is busy doing things in Real Life - final exams, crosscountry moves, messy relationship breakups, or work overload.
Meanwhile, I got back into the bus story a bit. Wrote another 440 words tonight. Probably spent more time staring at the screen wondering what to do, and deleting things, than writing. Ned the bus driver was stuck in front of a camera crew, and it took me a while to figure out how to get him away from them, and toward the next exciting part of the chapter - a high speed chase scene. He's now talking to the driver of the armoured car with which they will be doing the speeding, whereupon I stalled out again to look up information about truckers. Tomorrow I'll pick up from there and finally get the scene going (I hope).
I've also been spending a lot of time brainstorming possible nonfiction things I can write. Scenes from Inside a Chinese Takeout being a nice little memoir thing, for one. I can also write stuff about scientific field research, which can certainly have an adventurous angle to it - I've done some fun things as a geologist and marine ecologist, and stuff I've written here about my cruises has certainly managed to entertain people.
Guess that's where I am at the moment. Now I need to get some sleep...
2006/06/01
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.
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.
2005/02/09
Dragonfly
Well, I wrote .. something ... :D.
I had extremely surreal, complex dreams this morning. The last one before I woke up was about a giant dragonfly that was big enough for me to cling to its back while it flew me places. Later on, in the way dreams tend to segue smoothly into new scenes without any reason whatsoever, I was a 60 year old man dying of heart failure. The dragonfly was more of a sympathetic spirit in that part of the dream than an actual creature. By the time I woke up, I was convinced I was dying. (And that I was a 60 year old man with a wife and all sorts of family that I don't actually have.) It took me walking all the way into the bathroom before I remembered otherwise ...
Anyway, so that dream kind of nibbled at the back of my mind all day long. Finally I figured I needed to write it down. So I did.
It turned into a bizarre, surreal abstract piece of 846 words. That I actually kind of like. It was really cool, despite the lack of plot and characters. ;) I seem to be pretty good at writing strong endings, as this one has a very strong ending. I'm not entirely sure the rest of it leads up to the ending quite so well, but since it's a freewrite, that doesn't really bother me. I wrote it for me, and I felt the oomph behind the ending, and therefore it's good enough.
So, Novel Dare day 9, 2767 words. ;)
I had extremely surreal, complex dreams this morning. The last one before I woke up was about a giant dragonfly that was big enough for me to cling to its back while it flew me places. Later on, in the way dreams tend to segue smoothly into new scenes without any reason whatsoever, I was a 60 year old man dying of heart failure. The dragonfly was more of a sympathetic spirit in that part of the dream than an actual creature. By the time I woke up, I was convinced I was dying. (And that I was a 60 year old man with a wife and all sorts of family that I don't actually have.) It took me walking all the way into the bathroom before I remembered otherwise ...
Anyway, so that dream kind of nibbled at the back of my mind all day long. Finally I figured I needed to write it down. So I did.
It turned into a bizarre, surreal abstract piece of 846 words. That I actually kind of like. It was really cool, despite the lack of plot and characters. ;) I seem to be pretty good at writing strong endings, as this one has a very strong ending. I'm not entirely sure the rest of it leads up to the ending quite so well, but since it's a freewrite, that doesn't really bother me. I wrote it for me, and I felt the oomph behind the ending, and therefore it's good enough.
So, Novel Dare day 9, 2767 words. ;)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
