Tag: writing

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When I started writing fiction, I was in the fifth grade. My friends and I were obsessed with an Americanized anime called Robotech that was broadcast on a local UHF station after school. It became kind of like our soap opera and we watched endless hours of VHS recorded episodes before discovering a series of novelizations, which we also devoured. Somewhere in there, three of us decided we were going to write our own robots-vs-aliens stories and we worked for weeks in college ruled notebooks, crafting barely paraphrased prose that we would trade back and forth with each other for notes and critiques.

We quickly abandoned those stories, but I never quite stopped trying to find my way into a story I wanted to tell in long-form prose. In junior high school I tinkered with various speculative fiction genre adaptations, usually abandoning them the second someone pointed out which primary influence I had been inspired by. Then in high school I managed to draft (by hand, naturally) at least 2/3rds of a vampire-erotica novel probably mostly influenced by Anne Rice and hopefully lost to the dustbin of history (and the literal dustbin, because I don’t think anyone has ever asked for horny 90s teenage boy Lestat fanfic even once). I abandoned a dozen other novels after a chapter or two through my early twenties but I did settle on a Pahlaniuk-esque murder mystery/tragedy sometime in the mid aughts that was actively terrible but at least ended up being complete, in that I got to the point where I wrote “THE END” on a final (unsatisfying) page.

I got a bit distracted around the end of that decade when my wife and I decided to start raising a family, and it wasn’t until the early 2010s that I finally decided to pull my latent literary aspirations out into the light of day a little. The story I’ve told a zillion times is that I started feeling like a hypocrite in encouraging my daughter to reach for her dreams when I had never once done anything of the sort. So I started writing some more with the intent to actually share the stories with more than just my closest inner circle. Maybe, I thought, I’d even see about getting some published. It took a little while to get off the ground but then in 2011 I heard about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and decided to take the challenge. I completed the 50K word requirement, and it felt like a pretty big deal.

I skipped NaNoWriMo the following year to focus on revisions for a weird, alt-religious magical realism novel I had started mid-year. But I went back to NaNoWriMo in 2013 and managed to complete it for several years in a row.

The success of that first NaNoWriMo really set the tone for those next few years, energizing me with confidence that I could meet writing goals if I applied myself to the discipline. Aside from getting me to the point where I could complete a second trunk novel in 2012, they established a baseline for my productivity and helped me find part of my voice and develop the techniques I would use to get organized, complete projects, and adapt to challenges. I learned a lot each time I took on and completed the annual challenge and felt they helped to anchor my short fiction work and pursuits of publication the rest of the year. I looked forward each time to starting something new and seeing where I ended up.

Then in 2016, I tried again, but I failed. I missed the 50K word mark by less than 4,000 words. I didn’t try again the next year, or the year after that. I let this website languish, at one point the software broke and it began serving nothing but error pages and I couldn’t even be bothered to fix it.

I don’t recall when I made the connection that I was struggling with writer’s block and impostor syndrome. And look, this whole story is an old and tired tale of middling use to even fellow authors. I’m convinced that writer’s block is fundamentally a collapse of confidence. For an endeavor that is inherently conceited (“ladies and gentlebeings, lo! My WORDS. Marvel at them! Be intrigued by them; be entertained by them; revel in the majesty of my ideas and imagination!”), losing that confidence is a foundational collapse. But it’s also a fairly common collapse, and one might argue that a few clumsy would-be authors with crises of faith in their own questionable abilities slinking back into the silence is a necessary part of the culling process we call publishing.

But either way, at some point I recognized that I wasn’t doing it anymore. I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t submitting, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be a professional author any longer. The whys behind all of that, though, were complicated and messy. Difficult to distinguish from each other, perhaps because they were all wrapped up together, inextricably. For the record, here is an incomplete list of factors that played a part in me putting down my aspirations of becoming a published author, in no particular order:

  • Changes at work. Around this time I got promoted at my job, which put me back on an on-call rotation that sucked up some previously free time and demanded more of my mental energy.
  • Life balance. Shortly before I hung up my word processor, I had been spending more time working on my 200 CCs project as an editor and self-publisher than working on writing original fiction. I liked the work, particularly the way it encouraged me to use my creative energies across several different disciplines (reading submissions, collaborating with authors through editing, writing Editor’s columns, typesetting the interiors, graphic/visual design/photography for the website posts and digital print covers, etc). But it was a huge resource drain with a lot of self-imposed deadlines and by the time I curated the print anthology for year one, I was burnt out.
  • The 2016 elections. It sounds kind of silly to me now, looking back with the clarity of hindsight, but the election of a genuinely stupid and mean-spirited pseudo-rich guy with zero qualifications to the most important job in the country had a profound impact on me. For one thing, the election taking place the first week of November torpedoed my effort to complete NaNoWriMo that year. Plus, psychologically, the disappointment I had in many of my fellow citizens for falling for his brand of bigoted populism against their own better interests eroded a lot of faith I had in the will of the people. There was institutional disappointment as well given that I naively believed the system was designed in such a way to prevent such travesties from taking place and that turned out to be pure fantasy. The upending of a lot of my low-level notions about society and governance poisoned a lot of my imaginary conceits as well, to the point where the ideas necessary for nonfiction became muddled and the imagination required for crafting fiction became scrambled.
  • #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, in a roundabout way. Unsurprisingly, as a sexual predator weaseled his way toward the highest office in my country, a correlated pushback began which cast some much welcome light on some of the patterns of behavior that enabled shitty (mostly white) men to do their shitty things. Now, I try extremely hard to be the opposite of a shitty white guy. I can’t help being a guy or being white, and I’m lamentably human which means I’m bound to be shitty from time to time. But it’s very important to me that being awful never becomes part of the core of my being. I listened to a lot of people inside the #MeToo movement and later in similar movements such as BLM which, at their hearts, seemed to be about re-framing conversations to put people’s experiences at the center who hadn’t been centered like that before. I very much liked what those efforts did to elevate historically sidelined points of view but it made me ask a lot of hard questions about my own perspective. Did the world really need one more semi-affluent white penis-bearer’s ideas and opinions floating around out there? Wouldn’t publishing be better if I stepped back and let some minority voices take my spot instead? (The fact that I assumed I had “a spot” in the first place possibly being clear supporting evidence of this thesis.)
  • Depression. There’s not much to say here, but I’ve probably been suffering from undiagnosed mild depression off and on for much longer than I was on a writing hiatus, but around 2017 it got noticeably worse. Some or all of these other factors certainly played a role and depression has a nasty way of feeding itself and becoming a downward spiral.
  • Writer’s block. Possibly the least descriptively named ailment among those who endeavor to create, writer’s block makes it sound like those who have it cannot produce new work. That has not been my experience with it. As I said above, fundamentally being blocked is lacking the necessary confidence in your output to do anything with it besides bemoan its inadequacy. That doesn’t mean you can’t create, it’s just that the effort to do so feels wasted because the output does not meet your own self-imposed standards. Sometimes, as in my case, if this goes on long enough you might stop making that effort. Which I guess technically could be indistinguishable from being incapable of producing anything, but it feels important to draw the distinction that in most cases you could, it’s just that if you did it wouldn’t matter because you’d self-reject it anyway. For me, writer’s block grew out of a lot of the above factors: “I don’t have ample time to make this good; I don’t understand the world anymore; whatever I have to say could be said better and should be said instead by someone else; I don’t have much value to begin with, why should my writing?” And suddenly everything I write is trash so might as well just give it up and go back to playing video games.
  • General frustration with my progress, and recognition that my aspiration was possibly untenable. This one is stupid and embarrassing but real so I’ll list it anyway. When I started making a concerted effort to not just write fiction but get it published as well, I sat down and mapped out a ten-year plan with the goal of having a novel published. My thought at the time was that I would focus on short fiction early on, which I would use to hone my writing skills and give myself the chance to tinker with ideas and voices and perhaps make a small name for myself in certain genre circles before making my triumphant debut as a novelist. I started this around 2011, so I should have given myself until 2021 to see this plan come to fruition. But around 2017 I realized I was way past the halfway mark and had yet to even crack a professional-rate paying short fiction market. I mean, I came fairly close with Shock Totem publishing The Henson Curse (it wasn’t technically pro rates, but the pay was quite high for a semi-pro market), but the ones I felt would lend me legitimacy like Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Apex, etc weren’t biting at all. This realization that a mini-goal I hadn’t even included as part of my original roadmap was proving elusive shattered whatever confidence I may have had left over. On top of that, I took my fresh disillusionment on a whirlwind tour of “hard truth” exposĂ©s about incomes and expectations for professional authors and had to recognize that I was probably more likely to win the lottery I never play than I was to become one of the teeny, tiny handful of writers who can comfortably support an entire family with their novel-writing. At best I was probably facing a constant struggle either to manage two full-time careers or to supplement a novel-writing career with a bunch of side hustles just to keep going.

With all of this bearing down on me, I did what comes exceedingly natural to me: I buckled. Gave up. Went back to playing video games and goofing off with my kids. And maybe that could have—or should have—been the end of it. I gave it the ol’ college try, did my best, got a few stories out into the world so I had at least a little to show for it, but all’s well that ends well (or well enough), amirite?

I guess since you’re reading this on a resuscitated writing website you kind of know the answer to that already. Because eventually the fact that I had to say I “used to be” a writer started to kind of get annoying. Folks who had been super supportive during my stint publishing to small indie markets would occasionally ask, “gotten anything new published?” Their small, sad headshakes when I had to confess, no, I hadn’t, carried volumes of their own. And there were a few diversions along the way that kept me from feeling like I had ever totally closed the door on the notion. A slow-to-respond magazine picked up one of my later submissions before I stopped sending work out and published it in 2019. A couple of supportive publishers pressed a few of my stories out into end-of-year anthologies or followed up with some sort of encouragement. And, despite feeling like I wouldn’t ever be able to produce anything of marketable value, I couldn’t seem to quite keep myself from dusting off the occasional manuscript or story draft now and then.

Usually those forays ended up in frustration or disgust, but I kept coming back to them, sometimes with grand designs of “getting back into it” but often enough just with a bemused shrug, “I don’t know why I’m bothering, but something is compelling me.”

I thought, perhaps, that 2020 might be the year I really dove back in. Covid lockdown in 2020 was a very odd time for a lot of people and I know lots of folks who leveraged their angst and fear and uncertainty into creative pursuits. I thought I might be the same with writing, but it turned out I leveraged that time to work on and run an online Dungeons & Dragons campaign for my friends. Writing has always been something I indulged for my introverted side, a solitary activity where I can gesture at social connection through occasional peer-review workshops or coffeeshop drafting sessions but is, in effect, a thing I do by myself, for myself. During lockdown, that didn’t hold a lot of appeal for me, certainly not the way affecting silly voices and play-acting dragon slaying did. D&D had elements of writing but the payoff involved a desperately needed social encounter so it took center stage.

And then, once things started to open up again and I was playing D&D more for its own sake and not as a lifeline of human contact, I saw a prompt for an anthology that spoke to me. It made me want to write a story, so I did. I submitted it on a lark and got an acceptance (you can read a bit more detail about that over here). And I started thinking, “you know, maybe I’m not actually done with this writing thing after all.”

I spent the summer writing a new D&D campaign. Again, it’s not the same, but it is fiction writing adjacent and it gave me a setting, a place to play in and toy with. A place to exercise my imagination. And I started thinking. I started wondering if maybe there was something else inside this world I was building for my friends, something that might unlock a door I thought I’d lost the key to a long time ago.

A few months ago I fired up the old NaNoWriMo website and tentatively set up a project for 2023. I toiled away at a fresh novel-length story set in the D&D world I’d created. I worked on it for two weeks before I even let my family know I was participating in NaNoWriMo, and I mostly only did that so I could occasionally ask them for a little peace and quiet to get my daily word count finished without having to make up some weak excuse. And then, on November 30th, for the first time in seven years, I completed the challenge. 50,000 words of a brand-new novel in 30 days.

It’s actually kind of a small step. NaNo was never the most productive writing I did in the years when I was at peak authorial pursuit. Of the four pre-2020 projects where I clocked a minimum of 50K words, two were failed experiments, one was so ambitious I may never find a way to encapsulate it into a single finished book, and one was so ill-defined and dull to work on that I actually achieved my monthly word count by writing some random smut each day instead. The year I failed to complete the task I had actually set out to expand a novella I had already written and was having trouble getting published into a full-fledged novel, so even if I had produced 50,000 new words of writing, I’m not sure it would technically count. The novel I claimed as my triumphant return to writing this past November was barely halfway done, story-wise, even as the requisite word count threshold was reached.

But, I’ve spent time in the subsequent couple of months actually adding to that story, writing a dozen more chapters and finding the path to reach what I hope will be a satisfying conclusion. And in a way, that’s really what the contest has always been about for me: proving that I can not just do it but stick with it. Keep going, even when things aren’t going the way I want them to or when I’m not sure what I’m even doing here.

I can’t say I’ve fixed my worries that maybe I don’t need to add my voice to the chorus of speculative fiction writers, most of whom bring to the table things I can’t possibly bring (underrepresented perspectives, unique voices, novel lived experiences) and things I’m not sure I’ll ever achieve (strong stylistic vision, fresh ideas, economic prose). I definitely haven’t stopped feeling like an impostor nor am I cured of depression or my disillusionment with geopolitical realities.

But, for now, I’m writing again and I’m not putting any pressure on it this time. I’m back to doing it for me, for the joy I can find in it, and for the hope that someday, maybe, a handful of others might find a little joy in it as well.

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Trying something a bit different with this post. This was pitched and provided by Sarah Jones to be of interest to ironSoap.com readers on her subject of expertise, sleep health. If you enjoy this article, please leave a comment below and I can look into providing more guest features like this.

Many writers plunge through the depths of the nighttime darkness trying to finish writing their novel. In order to complete a word count for the day or a chapter or two, sleep often times becomes the one thing we give up as we chase our goals. But should you?

The Effects of No Sleep

Productivity and creative thinking are directly affected by sleep, or lack thereof. Our mental performance as writers is challenged by the amount of sleep we receive each day. Harvard Med has studies that show that lack of sleep stunts our creative thinking and our mental performance and quick-thinking cognitive abilities. In short, no sleep means dull and thoughtless writing.

Lack of sleep has negative effects on our creative processes as well as our mood and our health. No sleep often creates a foul mood as fatigue and sleepiness set in. During hours of sleep at night, our bodies recuperate and systems restore themselves. Not getting enough sleep challenges our health, mood, and cognitive abilities and can stunt the writing process instead of flourishing creativity.

When to Write, When to Sleep

The challenge we writers have is to make time for everything. Sleep is a must, as is carving time for writing our novel. Both can be achieved by practicing some techniques for a healthier and more restful experience.

Designate your writing times. Often times writers procrastinate and avoid writing, even if we have a novel to finish. You can either bully yourself and charge through to accomplish your writing, or listen to the passive procrastinator that doesn’t “feel” like writing today. A writer writes! Push through and treat it as a job and get that word count in so you can sleep tonight. Accomplishing daily goals in your writing will ease stress and anxiety and allow for a restful evening.

The Magic of Yoga Nidra

If you are getting a good amount of sleep at night, but still feel tired, consider trying yogic sleep. Yogic sleep or Yoga Nidra is a technique used that attains a “restorative sleep,” otherwise a sleep where you are completely relaxed and rested but are still fully aware during the process. Yogic sleep may take some practice, but once it is completed successfully, the benefits of a rested mind and body will help you finish your novel.

To try Yogic sleep, we first must engage in breathing exercises to steady our breathing and lower our heart rate and blood pressure.  The next step is to create a resolve, or attempt to manifest a factor that we wish to have in our lives such as peace or courage. The next steps involve separating the mind form the body, embrace the awareness of any feelings and emotions, and then to visualize as the process concludes. It is said that 45 minutes of this type of restorative sleep equates to approximately 3 hours of regular sleep, the benefits of sleep can be achieved in a much shorter period.

Yogic sleep is an excellent option for our bodies and minds to rest and recuperate without the hours and hours of sleep that we have avoided. Breathing exercises, organizing and planning, and getting proper exercise are also researched and proven elements that help de-stress our lives and increase productivity.

We need sleep to think, and we need our thinking to write. Shoving hours of sleepless writing into a novel will get you closer to completion, but may make for a massive editing headache. Sleep and rest increase our brain activity, which is the heart and soul of a writer’s world, so don’t stay up too late tonight, because you need your rest.

Sarah is the Editor of Sleepy Deep. Feeling the repercussions of being an irregular sleeper for far too long, she decided to do something about it. She learned why sleep is so important and how to maximize it, and is now helping others who are struggling to find their right sleep routine.

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by Ron Gibson, Jr.

after Maggie Nelson

This cursor blinks its steady pulse: birth pangs of the universe.

❦

Once we were a void. Once we were beautiful.

Where once a beautiful void, big rigs now knife down the interstate between frosted hills, under a blue period, a finality I cannot dispute, redistributing the future without you.

*

When we read books together, we would wear the author’s skin for a time. The fresh scars, the humility, the beauty. Their story became our story.

For weeks after Maggie Nelson’s ‘Bluets,’ blue dealt blows to the senses, it intoxicated. It made me question my relationhip with the world around me, and made you question your relationship with the world within you.

*

Humans have difficulty understanding evolution, difficulty understanding what we do not see. We do not see slowly moving changes to our world.

*

When I looked at you, through you, you became more haze than you. Each day you became more blue. Each day the hue deepened, and soon you were a fossil to record, a footprint to cast, only our words left tripping over snow-falling asterisks on blue screen, lost.

❦

This cursor still blinks steadily: product of an event beyond our control.

Void
Jan Kraus via Creative Commons

Ron Gibson JrRon Gibson, Jr. has previously appeared in Noble / Gas Quarterly, Pidgeonholes, Maudlin House, The Vignette Review, Ghost City Review, Cease Cows, Spelk Fiction, Ink in Thirds, Gravel Magazine, etc. And can be found on Twitter at @sirabsurd.

 

 

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counting III (cc)
Martin Fisch via Creative Commons

Word counts: a phrase that strikes utter apathy in the hearts of people everywhere. Well, most people. If you’re a writer or editor, you probably care (at least some) about word counts. They are a rough measure of the size of a piece of writing, and in shorter works (journal articles, short fiction, etc) they can be a measure of effort for use in paying writers. Typically book-length work is paid based on unit sales and/or other complicated algorithms so it matters less how many words something is once it reaches that scope. Now, determining what lengths qualify as “novel” versus, say, “novella” is a whole other discussion, but let’s focus on the fact that word counts are used to determine relative size and values for works that tend to be collected or anthologized.

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Two Years Before the Mast
Don McCullough via Creative Commons

Today marks the second anniversary of my efforts to become a published writer. I suppose I might mark my progress based on when I began writing in earnest instead, but to be honest the specific date is hazy and anyway lost to memory. But I do know for sure when I sent out my first submission, and that was April 9, 2013. It pre-dates this site, even.

In the past 24 months, I’ve sent out over 200 submissions, totaling well over 800,000 words read by more than 120 different markets. I’ve received somewhere north of 150 rejections. My skin is tougher.

I’ve also received just over a dozen acceptances. Alas, at least one of those will never turn into a publication. But I’m slowly cobbling together a list of published work. I’ve made some money (not a lot! still, some) by selling these works. In the time I’ve spent submitting these stories, I’ve written over 250,000 additional words across a couple of novels and roughly 30 new short pieces. I think—I hope—I’m getting better.

I’ve made some wonderful friends along the way, made some mistakes, learned new things. To those who have read the stories, commented, critiqued, retweeted, signal boosted, even detested the work, I am deeply grateful. The writing would continue regardless, but the sharing of stories is what makes an idle pastime into a thrilling endeavor. Opening my imagination in a way that makes another person feel something, or think, or laugh, or just be entertained, that is the principal joy for me. I am honored and indebted to anyone who has taken time out of their lives to spend with my work.

Of course, nothing in these past two years would have been possible without the support of my family. They have all sacrificed in ways big and small for me to pursue this mad dream I sometimes wish could be discarded but cannot. My wife, who has endured my self-doubt, my existential whinging, my failed experiments, and who has cheered me on and celebrated each small triumph along the way. My children, who inspire me with their imagination and their love. They have all given generously; time, encouragement, understanding, sometimes welcome distraction. I am awash in good fortune.

Onward and upward.

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I'm beginning to see the light
Matthias Ripp via Creative Commons

2014 was quite a ride. For me, anyway. After all, it’s not every year that you have a baby, move to a new town, get a new job, and make the first wobbly baby steps into a dreamed-of venture in the span of twelve months. And let’s be honest, most of that stuff all happened in the span of about three months in the middle of the year. For awhile there, I was just sort of holding on as best I could, trying not to get completely overwhelmed.

But I’m not complaining. 2014 wasn’t a flawless year, of course, but it was more good than bad and, for that, I’m grateful.

On a personal front, things are far more stable than they were a year ago. My second daughter arrived in the spring, making our family feel more complete. I’m gainfully employed with a company I like, working with people I respect in a job I’m pretty good at. We have a place to live in a town that feels like home. My older daughter started school (Kindergarten) and seems to be thriving there. My wife and I celebrated our 15 year anniversary and couldn’t be happier.

As a writer, I feel like my ten year plan is proceeding along at an acceptable pace. I followed up my very first publication just over a year ago with six new short story publications, including my first print pub. I landed my first pro-paying acceptance near the end of the year. One of my stories received an Honorable Mention from the Writers Of The Future contest. I even earned a tiny bit of money from my writing.

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Mirror fun
Kevin Jaako via Creative Commons

Have you seen this Hemingwrite thing? Basically it’s a dedicated word processor with an typewriter design aesthetic but some modern technology touches like cloud-syncing and an e-Ink digital screen.

I’ll be honest, I think the thing is sexy as can be. I have a certain fetish for typewriters to begin with, so this preys directly upon that sensibility while neatly sidestepping the fact that, romanticism aside, writing on such a device would require a huge sacrifice in the convenience department. But I can’t lie and say it’s not alluring to be presented with the opportunity to have some of that nostalgic cake and digitize it, too.

But then I read the kickstarter page, and I realize this is a product that is being sold to fix a problem it can’t reasonably be expected to address. And it’s not the first product to take aim at the hapless writer this way, either. Continue reading →

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2014 Winner NaNoWriMo
Used with permission from National Novel Writing Month

Well, I managed to finish the NaNoWriMo project—from their 50,000-word guideline perspective anyway—once again at or near the midnight hour. I have been terribly off pace since early in the month and it’s taken a lot of gritted teeth to power through to the finish line. I think, more so than anything else, the challenge this year has been simply that there are other things I would have rather been working on. At no point did this novel ever really capture my imagination and demand to be written down. But as I said going into the month, that’s probably a good thing. Having the luxury of working on the latest inspiration isn’t something it would be wise to come to expect. So I set the goal and I stuck with it, even when it was difficult. Because this year, more so than the other two where I participated, there were times that I really wanted to just call it off. To pack it in and shrug it off. It’s just a silly self-directed contest, after all.

Right?

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OR gate
Martin Kenny via Creative Commons

About two months ago I began volunteering as a first reads editor for a small semi-pro science fiction magazine. If you’re a writer who regularly submits fiction to publishing markets, you’ll recognize this role as the “slush reader.” If you’re not a writer, the short explanation is that unsolicited submissions are collected into what is called the slush pile—a stack of stories sent in cold for publishing consideration. The editor-in-chief is usually the person responsible for purchasing stories they want to publish, but in a lot of cases the number of submissions overwhelms the time an editor-in-chief could reasonably devote to reading and making a decision upon.

Many markets use slush readers, almost always volunteers, who comb through the submissions and reject the ones they feel have no chance of being approved by the decision-makers and passing along only those that pass first inspection.

Slush reading has a reputation of being something of a thankless job. Aside from being unpaid, it can take a significant amount of time, depending on the volume of submissions and the current number of active first readers. Plus, there is the perception—true or not—that slush reading means reading a lot of really awful stories.

My reasoning for undertaking this endeavor is that, having spent a year and a half having my writing read by these pre-screeners, I wanted to get a taste of life on the other side of the submissions queue. I have some designs of doing editorial projects in the future and I felt this was a good way to get some experience in editorial-adjacent work. The other factor, and not an insignificant one, is that I heard from a few writer friends who slush read on the side that doing so was beneficial to their own writing. Seeing common mistakes that got stories rejected was good, they said, for helping them avoid similar mistakes in their own work.

So I answered a call for first readers from Plasma Frequency Magazine. My experience with them was fairly limited; I had read a couple of issues as part of my research project to get a sense of what certain markets accept. I submitted one story to them which passed their first two reading tiers and was, eventually, rejected by the editor-in-chief. I had thought about submitting other stuff to them, but decided to see about the position first (volunteer editors are not allowed to submit to PFM).

Once I was brought onboard I began reading through the submissions queue and making decisions. To be honest, at first I didn’t think too closely about it and just tried to be fair about what I thought had a chance at being picked up by the editor-in-chief.

But over the following couple of weeks I started seeing certain things happen that opened my eyes to what might be going on behind the scenes at markets where I had pending submissions. Obviously I can’t assume that my observations map to anyone else’s, or even that the processes of doing first reads are all that comparable (I have only this experience—and a very small sample of it at that—to go on), but thinking about how this plays from both sides of the fence has been interesting at least, and possibly instructive.

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Halfway House Cafe BBQ
Andrew Morrell via Creative Commons

Just a quick check in today to update a few things.

  • Halfway through the NaNoWriMo month and … well, I’m behind. I don’t think it’s yet at the point where all is lost, but I should be at the 25,000 word mark and I’m about 7,000 words off the pace. Now, that’s not something I can’t overcome: I’ve written 3,500-4,000 words in a day plenty of times. But it’s a daunting place to be in. Looking back on last year, I see that I was woefully behind around mid-month then as well and I ended up rallying and coming through with a strong second half. I hope that’s the case again. I’m still struggling to get into this story the way I would like, which worries me because at least last year I was enthusiastic about the problem, even if I was struggling with having been laid off right around the beginning of the month. Most days this time around I feel like it’s a chore to reach the standard 1,667 words. But I’m still plugging away as best I can, hoping I can find some inspiration somewhere and finish strong.
  • A small part of my NaNo struggles also come down to the number of other related tasks I’m dealing with. I’ve been trying to keep this blog more frequently updated, and part of that involves doing some reading for the Short List series that I’m still enthusiastic about. Plus I’m reading a really good book right now and a lot of my friends keep getting really great stories published which are piling up on me. I’ve also been reading chapter books (not picture books) to my oldest daughter at bedtime, which has been fun and I want to write some new reviews of these children’s books based on the new readings and the conversations they spark with her, but finding time is so challenging. Not to mention I’m still trying to check in on the slush reading gig regularly. And, of course, there are non-literary issues to contend with including a baby who’s teething and not sleeping well, illnesses that keep nagging our family, and a renewed effort on my part to fix some of my health issues by eating better and exercising. These are things every person—and particularly every writer, I’m sure—contends with, but sometimes they seem to pile up a little higher and this month feels like one of those periods.
  • On the bright side, some writer friends of mine turned me on to QuarterReads, a new site for writers and readers that operates a little on the microtransaction model that was sort of hot a number of years ago. Basically you drop $10 into the site and that gives you 40 reads at twenty-five cents. The stories are all under 2,000 words and most of the money goes directly to the author. If you like the story, you can tip up to another seventy-five cents. They do read and vet each submission which gives some quality control to the site so you know you’re not getting unfiltered, unedited garbage. And there are some pretty heavy hitters posting work there now, such as Ken Liu, Cat Rambo, and a couple of people I know and can personally vouch for: Alexis A. Hunter and Natalia Theodoridou. Anyway, I think it’s a really interesting model, and I genuinely hope it succeeds. I even have a story up there now, Corkscrew, which you may recall appeared on the Toasted Cake podcast earlier this year. This is the first print version of the story available, so if you missed it first time around, here’s another chance to catch it.
  • Speaking of publications, it seems that October ended my rather unlikely streak of publications. From April through September of this year, I had a new publication come out every month. I have one publication pending, an anthology I’m thrilled to be a part of and can’t wait to see come out. But even my most optimistic hopes for it wouldn’t permit the streak to stay alive; the publishers are putting out an advance review copy (ARC) and only finalized the contributors list in September. Not too much chance of a one-month turnaround there. Still, I’m amazed and humbled by this past year’s small step forward. Six stories this year was more than I could have hoped for, and in the meantime I’ve continued to write and (hopefully!) improve, so I’d like to say this is only the beginning. For those who have supported me by reading or signal boosting—in particular my ever-patient wife who also manages to make time to be my biggest cheerleader—I thank you. I write for me, but I try hard to be better for you.