SFR 2006 Final Count: 51,960 / 90,000 words
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count) +1012
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
What is it to be Human: 726
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 13,732
Blogs: 28,125
RPoL: 1038
Well ... I did more than half my stated goal. That's a step up from how I do in most of these challenges. Yeah, I think I'm really only good for one big challenge a year, and that would be Nanowrimo. The rest of the time, I'm better off just plodding along at my slow but steady snail's pace.
I wouldn't say my three months were unproductive. Although I didn't write that many total words, I did get myself educated somewhat better about the whole publishing industry. I've started reading Miss Snark regularly, and paying attention to the blogs of other writerly type people (John Scalzi and Making Light, in particular). And thinking about writing in general beyond Fortress Launne. There's probably a lot of nonfiction short things I could do, if I knew about them.
Of course, on the flip side, I may be better off trying to focus on only one project at a time. Everything slows to a crawl when I'm doing lots of different things.
Oh well. Onward with the whole learning thing. Upward. :)
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
2006/07/29
SFR winding down...
02 / 90 days to go | 89 / 90 days gone
50,229 / 90,000 words done | 38,771 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count) +1012
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
What is it to be Human: 726
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 12,903
Blogs: 27,223
RPoL: 1038
Yeah. I've basically given up. And I don't think I'm going to sign up for any more non-Nanowrimo writing marathons. All they tend to do is make everything stressful instead of fun. I haven't eliminated Labor Day Novel from consideration this year, but at this point I'm not real sure how well that's going to go, considering I do have to work three hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, right during the middle of the day, which will probably kill my flow. But we'll see...
The game What is it to be Human? took off like a rocket after I nudged three people into joining. The GM suddenly started taking an interest in the game again, and has been doing a lot of admin housecleaning - removing obviously-gone players, changing the way we do things threadwise, etc. He's around to post quite a lot more now than he has been for months. He hasn't paid this much attention to the game since he first started it back in 2003.
And in the process, I'm pretty stoked again too. There's a couple posts I need to write for one of my characters, and I'm a tad stuck, but I'm still having a good time reading everyone else's activities and recognizing all the plot bits everywhere. Being able to actually talk about the game to other people helps a lot too (the aforementioned three people).
On the downside, however, it means that my own plans for a fanfic has screeched to a halt. I can't write an alternate storyline while the "real" storyline is still in progress. I detest contradictions from canon, and it's the main reason why my Star Trek paperback collection is 90% TOS. I didn't want to buy any of the novels from the other series while those series were actually still on TV. The same applies to fanfic in general, and is why I don't read it.
So now I'm planning to write down a much-reduced version of the hunter story, turn it into a single standalone scene of not more than 20 paragraphs, and use that to explain 5 hours of Rumen's evening where he's got nothing else going on. After I do that, I can get on to the important part - just before dawn where there's a whole lot of stuff going on to other people in the game, that he's going to know about and want to react to.
What all this means, of course, is that I'm throwing myself wholeheartedly back into roleplay. I need to take a break from writing for a while. I need to get back to writing just to write, the way I breath - and not look at it as some sort of monumentally important task. I write quite well when I don't think about it at all, as my roleplay posts demonstrate to me quite clearly.
I'll still blog, of course. The takeout blog gets entries whenever I can think of anything to talk about, though most of the time all I need is a starting point, and I end up finding an entire iceberg under the tip.
Dragonfly isn't ready to be finished yet. I don't know what the entire story is, and there's a part of my subconscious that tells me it's still baking. There are pieces that I don't have yet. So I'm going to ease back and take my time, and try for having it finished by next summer.
Fortress Launne continues to recede from my mind, though there are vague twinges here and there all the time. Maybe it means that I'll get a nice tsunami at some point, but it's not here yet.
At the same time, I recently read a "how to become a writer" article on John Scalzi's Whatever blog, and in it he suggests getting a copy of Writer's Market. Poking on Amazon a bit, I note that they put out a new edition every year, and the next edition will be available in early August. I'm planning to pick up a copy, just to see what's in it, and whether there's anything non-fiction I can do with it.
Meanwhile, roleplay is going well. My game is still moving along, though still slowly. I'm in the process of kicking out a problem player - one that was cheating a few months back, and whom has since then been remarkably aggravating about just how much he can possibly get away with doing. Having him in the game isn't fun, and I want to have fun in my game, so out he's going. I'm looking around for someone to replace him - not necessarily his specific character, who is well positioned to die horribly at the moment - but someone who can take up getting entangled in the same subplots. I've managed to interest the GM of What is it to be Human? so far; he's working on a character as we speak.
And I'd like to get the mage stuff kicked off during August. That's primetime for player recruitment. I just need to finish working out the character sheets a bit more, and then start advertising in a number of key games.
Guess I'll hold off on any final thoughts about how I did with SFR until the beginning of August. I'll still be writing a lot of roleplaying posts until then.
50,229 / 90,000 words done | 38,771 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count) +1012
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
What is it to be Human: 726
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 12,903
Blogs: 27,223
RPoL: 1038
Yeah. I've basically given up. And I don't think I'm going to sign up for any more non-Nanowrimo writing marathons. All they tend to do is make everything stressful instead of fun. I haven't eliminated Labor Day Novel from consideration this year, but at this point I'm not real sure how well that's going to go, considering I do have to work three hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, right during the middle of the day, which will probably kill my flow. But we'll see...
The game What is it to be Human? took off like a rocket after I nudged three people into joining. The GM suddenly started taking an interest in the game again, and has been doing a lot of admin housecleaning - removing obviously-gone players, changing the way we do things threadwise, etc. He's around to post quite a lot more now than he has been for months. He hasn't paid this much attention to the game since he first started it back in 2003.
And in the process, I'm pretty stoked again too. There's a couple posts I need to write for one of my characters, and I'm a tad stuck, but I'm still having a good time reading everyone else's activities and recognizing all the plot bits everywhere. Being able to actually talk about the game to other people helps a lot too (the aforementioned three people).
On the downside, however, it means that my own plans for a fanfic has screeched to a halt. I can't write an alternate storyline while the "real" storyline is still in progress. I detest contradictions from canon, and it's the main reason why my Star Trek paperback collection is 90% TOS. I didn't want to buy any of the novels from the other series while those series were actually still on TV. The same applies to fanfic in general, and is why I don't read it.
So now I'm planning to write down a much-reduced version of the hunter story, turn it into a single standalone scene of not more than 20 paragraphs, and use that to explain 5 hours of Rumen's evening where he's got nothing else going on. After I do that, I can get on to the important part - just before dawn where there's a whole lot of stuff going on to other people in the game, that he's going to know about and want to react to.
What all this means, of course, is that I'm throwing myself wholeheartedly back into roleplay. I need to take a break from writing for a while. I need to get back to writing just to write, the way I breath - and not look at it as some sort of monumentally important task. I write quite well when I don't think about it at all, as my roleplay posts demonstrate to me quite clearly.
I'll still blog, of course. The takeout blog gets entries whenever I can think of anything to talk about, though most of the time all I need is a starting point, and I end up finding an entire iceberg under the tip.
Dragonfly isn't ready to be finished yet. I don't know what the entire story is, and there's a part of my subconscious that tells me it's still baking. There are pieces that I don't have yet. So I'm going to ease back and take my time, and try for having it finished by next summer.
Fortress Launne continues to recede from my mind, though there are vague twinges here and there all the time. Maybe it means that I'll get a nice tsunami at some point, but it's not here yet.
At the same time, I recently read a "how to become a writer" article on John Scalzi's Whatever blog, and in it he suggests getting a copy of Writer's Market. Poking on Amazon a bit, I note that they put out a new edition every year, and the next edition will be available in early August. I'm planning to pick up a copy, just to see what's in it, and whether there's anything non-fiction I can do with it.
Meanwhile, roleplay is going well. My game is still moving along, though still slowly. I'm in the process of kicking out a problem player - one that was cheating a few months back, and whom has since then been remarkably aggravating about just how much he can possibly get away with doing. Having him in the game isn't fun, and I want to have fun in my game, so out he's going. I'm looking around for someone to replace him - not necessarily his specific character, who is well positioned to die horribly at the moment - but someone who can take up getting entangled in the same subplots. I've managed to interest the GM of What is it to be Human? so far; he's working on a character as we speak.
And I'd like to get the mage stuff kicked off during August. That's primetime for player recruitment. I just need to finish working out the character sheets a bit more, and then start advertising in a number of key games.
Guess I'll hold off on any final thoughts about how I did with SFR until the beginning of August. I'll still be writing a lot of roleplaying posts until then.
2006/06/16
SFR Over the Hill
44 / 90 days to go | 46 / 90 days gone
27,156 / 90,000 words done | 18,844 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 6114
Blogs: 14,016
I spoke too soon about the death of roleplay. Today all the wolves woke up with a vengeance, and I spent my afternoon hanging two of them from the tops of trees. They were learning to fly, but had some bad dice rolls...
Now if the vampires have a similar awakening, things would start moving forward again quite rapidly. I must admit to liking the wolves quite a bit more though. Every time I write for them, I remember why I'm running the game.
One of these days I'll get around to starting up the mage storyline too, though I might wait until August. By then I'm hoping my current players will stop having quite so many offline difficulties. Coincidentally this would also be after the end of SFR.
At this point it's just over half over, and I'm around 19k words behind. I do feel more focused than I have in a week, though. And I have a plan in mind for what to do in the next couple weeks - line edit the first 9 chapters of the bus story. One chapter per night shouldn't be too bad. I'll have to keep up with roleplay at the same time, so I'm not going to declare that this will be done in 9 days. I'll try for end-of-June, taking days off if there's a lot of roleplay to do. If I get done with the first nine chapters sooner than June 30, I'll go into a bonus round of finishing off chapter 10 - and then an extra bonus round of finishing the novella.
I've also passed chapter 5 to my friend who was born in Russia. Hopefully he'll be able to fix my details with the Russian bandits. He turns out to be a writer as well, so we might end up trading crits. I looked over the first draft of a prologue he wrote and gave him a few broad-stroke suggestions about it; he did thank me, though I'm not sure he was exactly thrilled with everything I said.
Once July starts, I'm submitting Dragonfly, then getting started on Amulet II. It needs a thorough reread and lots of plothole filling before I can write the ending. (Sort of the same boat as Stranger on a Bus, except three times the size.)
One of my cousins announced today that one of her short stories got published in an online literary fiction magazine. Yay her. :) I browsed around on their website and noticed that not only does Dragonfly resemble the stories on there (in the sense of being scene snapshots and internal reflections without much actual plot), Dragonfly looks better. ;) That one isn't a paying market, but I'll keep it in mind if no one else wants to buy it. My hopes are up at the moment, though.
And finally, I told my mother about the Chinese takeout job today. She said I should do something that involves learning something new, making some money, and also having fun.
I said, "I am. I'm learning all sorts of things that I didn't learn the first time. Even though it was right in front of me."
I think she understood. But that's why I ought to write the memoir. So I can explain to my mother why I'm there. At this stage it's not something I can put into words yet, though. It's still early in the game for that. Maybe next year.
27,156 / 90,000 words done | 18,844 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 6114
Blogs: 14,016
I spoke too soon about the death of roleplay. Today all the wolves woke up with a vengeance, and I spent my afternoon hanging two of them from the tops of trees. They were learning to fly, but had some bad dice rolls...
Now if the vampires have a similar awakening, things would start moving forward again quite rapidly. I must admit to liking the wolves quite a bit more though. Every time I write for them, I remember why I'm running the game.
One of these days I'll get around to starting up the mage storyline too, though I might wait until August. By then I'm hoping my current players will stop having quite so many offline difficulties. Coincidentally this would also be after the end of SFR.
At this point it's just over half over, and I'm around 19k words behind. I do feel more focused than I have in a week, though. And I have a plan in mind for what to do in the next couple weeks - line edit the first 9 chapters of the bus story. One chapter per night shouldn't be too bad. I'll have to keep up with roleplay at the same time, so I'm not going to declare that this will be done in 9 days. I'll try for end-of-June, taking days off if there's a lot of roleplay to do. If I get done with the first nine chapters sooner than June 30, I'll go into a bonus round of finishing off chapter 10 - and then an extra bonus round of finishing the novella.
I've also passed chapter 5 to my friend who was born in Russia. Hopefully he'll be able to fix my details with the Russian bandits. He turns out to be a writer as well, so we might end up trading crits. I looked over the first draft of a prologue he wrote and gave him a few broad-stroke suggestions about it; he did thank me, though I'm not sure he was exactly thrilled with everything I said.
Once July starts, I'm submitting Dragonfly, then getting started on Amulet II. It needs a thorough reread and lots of plothole filling before I can write the ending. (Sort of the same boat as Stranger on a Bus, except three times the size.)
One of my cousins announced today that one of her short stories got published in an online literary fiction magazine. Yay her. :) I browsed around on their website and noticed that not only does Dragonfly resemble the stories on there (in the sense of being scene snapshots and internal reflections without much actual plot), Dragonfly looks better. ;) That one isn't a paying market, but I'll keep it in mind if no one else wants to buy it. My hopes are up at the moment, though.
And finally, I told my mother about the Chinese takeout job today. She said I should do something that involves learning something new, making some money, and also having fun.
I said, "I am. I'm learning all sorts of things that I didn't learn the first time. Even though it was right in front of me."
I think she understood. But that's why I ought to write the memoir. So I can explain to my mother why I'm there. At this stage it's not something I can put into words yet, though. It's still early in the game for that. Maybe next year.
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.)
2006/06/01
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.
2006/05/31
SFR End of First Month
SFR 2006:
59 / 90 days to go | 31 / 90 days gone
16,348 / 90,000 words done | 14,652 words behind
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4169
Blogs: 9366
I'm really not doing too good. Tonight was the first time I wrote anything in days. All new words were roleplay, and I was stuck with what to do for that for quite a while. Tonight's efforts were another three-post simul-post. I have three other posts to do in other games, but I can safely put them off without holding up anyone other than the GM. And Robert wants me to slip off for some more Diablo 2, so I'll just do that instead. :)
What've I been doing instead of writing? Lots of reading. Assimilating a ton of info about agents and the publishing industry in general. I know very little, but I've been slowly reading Miss Snark. (Thanks ellsea for pointing me to that. :) ) There's a lot of useful info in there for when I'll actually need to submit something.
Speaking of submissions, I found some writing contests that I could enter. Dragonfly might fit into one of them; it's an annual contest at a literary fiction magazine. I'm thinking Stranger on a Bus could get submitted to another one that's open to all writers of Asian descent (which would include me); however, the story has nothing to do with Asian or Asian American issues and doesn't even have any Asian-descent characters in it. So I don't know how well it'll do. I might try to come up with something else for it instead. I'm also contemplating a "Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout" as a nonfiction memoir-like thing to submit somewhere. Maybe New Yorker? I don't know yet.
Of course, all of that would depend on me getting off my butt and finishing/editting things. Right now, though, I'm sucked in pretty good on Snark archives...
59 / 90 days to go | 31 / 90 days gone
16,348 / 90,000 words done | 14,652 words behind
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4169
Blogs: 9366
I'm really not doing too good. Tonight was the first time I wrote anything in days. All new words were roleplay, and I was stuck with what to do for that for quite a while. Tonight's efforts were another three-post simul-post. I have three other posts to do in other games, but I can safely put them off without holding up anyone other than the GM. And Robert wants me to slip off for some more Diablo 2, so I'll just do that instead. :)
What've I been doing instead of writing? Lots of reading. Assimilating a ton of info about agents and the publishing industry in general. I know very little, but I've been slowly reading Miss Snark. (Thanks ellsea for pointing me to that. :) ) There's a lot of useful info in there for when I'll actually need to submit something.
Speaking of submissions, I found some writing contests that I could enter. Dragonfly might fit into one of them; it's an annual contest at a literary fiction magazine. I'm thinking Stranger on a Bus could get submitted to another one that's open to all writers of Asian descent (which would include me); however, the story has nothing to do with Asian or Asian American issues and doesn't even have any Asian-descent characters in it. So I don't know how well it'll do. I might try to come up with something else for it instead. I'm also contemplating a "Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout" as a nonfiction memoir-like thing to submit somewhere. Maybe New Yorker? I don't know yet.
Of course, all of that would depend on me getting off my butt and finishing/editting things. Right now, though, I'm sucked in pretty good on Snark archives...
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