I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Sunday Night, at Home With My Rejections and WIPs

Podcastle has already has already responded with a form rejection. I'll need to go back to duotrope and work out the next part of the list. As I remember I'm running out of markets with electronic submissions (that pay semi-pro and above).

In other news Chapter 34's crappy first draft is in the bag at 1760 words. Mostly exposition. Things are teed up for Chapter 35 and we're on track as far as word count goes.

Hopefully this week will be productive. Things are a bit torn up about the house and I need to rewire some decorations before I put them up. This coming weekend there's a good chance we'll take a trip to experience Christmas in Zoar VIllage. This year we'll need to find out when the organ recital is going to happen so we arrive earlier than the last five minutes.

And now, after four straight days of sleeping in, I'm mostly rested up. I'm now ready to go to Viable Paradise. Sigh. To bad I didn't do this before going to Marthas Vineyard. But now it's time to go turn off the lights and then warm up the bed. Most of the turkey is gone, although we have plenty of gravy left. Need to think of what to do with it tomorrow.

2 comments:

Rick said...

Sorry about the rejection, Steve. Part of the game, you know, but still painful.

I've been running 2500 words per chapter on my werewolf novel, and I have to tell you I might try to knock them down to size a bit. They feel a bit too long.

And that sucks about the dwindling market for short fiction.

Steve Buchheit said...

Rick, yep it's part of the game. PodCastle was sort of a long shot, but that voice in the back of my head said, "Go for it."

For the WIP novel, I'm trying to keep all the chapters below 2000 (to make for a fast read), which means for a first draft they should be around 15-1700, which is where we're ending up.

For the short fiction, I have come to like some of the stories I've ground out, and would like to get to some of the ideas I have stubs for, but I think I am a novelist at heart. And writing shorts has given me the experience I looked for when I started them.

That doesn't mean I won't continue to drop them out from time to time. There's a couple good ones (as I've said) I have partials for, and one in particular I want to finish for a certain editor's open call, if for no other reason than when I think/imagine the scenes they make me all giggly inside (in the "Asylum Giggling" fashion). Lots of sickly green light on squamous shambling things mixed with deep water blue with darker overtones, men with guns fighting things that can't be killed easily with guns, great place names (that are real places), and, of course, the gibbering madness that lay just on the other side of this facade we call reality.