Goal: 5 stories, 3 outlines with a focus on shorter works

I did 3 stories and 3 outlines. Two of the three stories were 8,000 words+ each, including the one for the James Gunn online workshop (this took up much of my writing time, which I will talk about in a separate entry). It seems every time I try to mold an idea into a story under 5,000 words that I find themes and issues I want to explore with it, and it ends up at novelette length.

Case in point: Over the past few weeks alone I produced two of my three outlines for stories, with the intention of creating a 2,000 word gem for the Distant Horizons anthology (since the pay is just $100 per story, I wanted to keep my word rate at 5-cents per word if possible). But each story threatened to come in at at least 5,000 words, so it was only in the last few weeks did I figure out a plot I could tell in under 2,500 words. Still might not finish the story by the deadline (June 1), but here's hoping.

Of course I also did a requested revision, plus quite a few extra tweaks to "Outgoing," which sold to Asimov's last week. So no regrets there on forsaking my goal partially for this task. "Outgoing" is my longest fiction to date at almost 14,000 words.

I'm still worried about my output speed though. I'd love to produce a story per week at Clarion, but even the story for the James Gunn class (at 12,000 words unfortunately) that took me almost six weeks to write and rewrite is only finally now at the point where I'm comfortable showing it to people. Sharing it in installments and rough drafts throughout the last six weeks hasn't agreed with me, and why would I share a story with critiquers when I haven't gotten it to the point where it needs to be?

Still I've got a month to work on this. Four very-short stories by Clarion. I think I'm fooling myself.

Rapid Reading and Organization

Here's the bad part about stating goals so openly. When you drop them it's just embarrassing to admit it.

I've been doing a great deal of reading, but a lot of it was on the screen of my Palm or computer, on which I haven't been able to apply the Rapid Reading techniques. So I could be faster, slower, or just the same as I was two months ago. I feel better about my retention rate, but frankly I've got too much on my plate right now to quantify that.

As for my organization, I had to throw out my earlier goals. I'm just too fantastically messy with too much physical baggage of my 29 years to get everything nice and pretty by the time I leave for Clarion. So I've rearranged my expectations, and I'm doing what I can. I do feel more comfortable about not having all my notes with me in Michigan, and at least I've got my digital files to a point where I can find the important stuff.



Filed under Clarion, Journal, Prose and Poetry
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