There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Monday, November 19, 2007

It Must Be Winter and Rejection Holiday

Well, if it weren't for the snow over the weekend (no, none of it staid around for long) there are other signs it's winter. Say, like the 3 pages of hand written notes on three different stories in different levels of progress, including a short-story stub I hadn't thought about for a while. Add to that the full scrap of paper notes I made this morning here at work. And all of it is story (with a few notes on research needed, such as "Snake Eaters" are Force Recon, and do the kids these days say SpecFor or SOCOM).

Also this weekend I got a rejection from Dark Wisdom on "My Favorite War Stories." It read as a form email. Yesterday I killed my darling (the first 900 words) and started rewriting. Some of the notes form the weekend and this morning were for the rewrite. The SEAL character now has a name (Casey Batterson, dont' make fun of it, that's what lead to him being a SEAL). The gist of those 900 words will be there, but I have to get to the main story faster, so they have to go and get meta instead of inference (more telling than showing, or a different way of showing that doesn't include the stone by stone journey log).

3 comments:

ThatGreenyFlower said...

Rock on, O John Henry of the writing world!

Camille Alexa said...

What about new stuff? Did you get some new stuff started on the retreat? Everybody likes new stuff.

Steve Buchheit said...

Thanks Greeny, we keep plugging away.

Camille, there was about a page a half (handwritten notes) in the past week on the story I started at the retreat (Shawn and the Moon). Some of it yesterday and Sunday night. It went towards a piece I've been having the most trouble with, which is the sex scene. It also ties together some other images and allusions I had been using (smart me, eh, to have foreshadowing) and brought in a new way to describe the touch of the Moon.

Then there is the extra stuff on a story stubb, that story feels like a novella at least. I like it, I just haven't wanted to put much time into it when I don't have much chance of selling it. Heck, it may even be another novel (although probably a short one).