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Friday Freewrite
I've been trying to come up with things to do with my romance-author blog, since I don't really want to do a lot of personal journaling there and don't often have anything new to announce* -- and then someone on the Dreamspinner mailing list mentioned doing weekly writing prompts at her blog, and I went "Ooh!"
Friday seemed like a good day for it: everyone is sick of working and needs a break. :D
So I posted a writing prompt just now: Drawing on skin. You can write a scene or a little story or whatever. Or fanfic. Or do some art. Or write a poem, or a song. Anything creative. :) If you aren't comfortable posting over there, you could post over here if you'd rather. Or post at your journal and link to it. I'm easy! I'll try to post a new one every week, and I'll also announce it here.
*At least my romance alias DOES manage to sell things. My scifi/fantasy stuff is essentially being shoveled down a black hole of rejection. *sobs into keyboard*
Friday seemed like a good day for it: everyone is sick of working and needs a break. :D
So I posted a writing prompt just now: Drawing on skin. You can write a scene or a little story or whatever. Or fanfic. Or do some art. Or write a poem, or a song. Anything creative. :) If you aren't comfortable posting over there, you could post over here if you'd rather. Or post at your journal and link to it. I'm easy! I'll try to post a new one every week, and I'll also announce it here.
*At least my romance alias DOES manage to sell things. My scifi/fantasy stuff is essentially being shoveled down a black hole of rejection. *sobs into keyboard*
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It's all over the map, though. Mostly it's pretty similar to my fanfic: action-adventure type stuff. Space opera and whatnot. I have an urban fantasy novel with a queer POC protagonist that's currently being rejected by agents. (I may eventually give up and publish it myself.) I've also written a couple of SFF YA novels that I need to revise and see if I can place anywhere. I had a story in this anthology, which is about the closest I've come (yet!) to professional publication.
That is very cool that you are doing it too! Original spec-fic high five! :D Do you have anything out anywhere that I might look for?
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I'd say we should form some kind of novel-shopping moral support group, but I think at this point mine needs revision more than it needs more submission. I do occasionally wonder if self-publishing would be worth it, though I'm not sure the market's quite there for middlegrade or YA. Though possibly I could go for direct submission to a smaller publisher – Tu Kids Books comes to mind, or Crossed Genres. (The novel I have finished in draft has a young PoC main character, and the one I'm working on most seriously at the moment is a Gay YA which started life as the most bizarre amalgamation of prompts and has resolved into a semi-hard sci-fi story with a vigilante deserter from the United Earth Air & Space Force who kidnaps a Earth System Police cadet and drags her out past the edge of the inhabited system to try to expose some Evil Science going on. Only for both of them to discover that what's going on is way weirder than any of that. It's a lot of fun, though it's not going quickly.)
I feel like I've had a lot of support and training in how to write short stuff – I was able to attend Clarion West in 2008, which definitely bumped my skills in short work to another level – but I don't have the same grasp on how long-form stuff works, which is a little frustrating.
I've got a list of my published short works on my site, which is in desperate need of a redesign, but I keep not having the time or inclination to figure that out. Spec-five! \o/
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And I totally remember reading that swanskin story! It was one of my favorite ones from Expanded Horizons, actually. (Or at least one of the ones that stuck in my head the most firmly. But I definitely remember it; I thought it was lovely.) \o/
*bows to your writing talent*
Short stuff is what I'm worst at. My natural inclination is to write long. I think of myself as a "tapestry" writer, which is just my own head-term for creating giant epics full of myriad characters going in a million directions (which is what Kismet, the webcomic, is). I write for character first, I guess, which means I struggle terribly with the short form, which is all about idea and style. Although based upon the results I'm (not) getting from the long works, it's possible that I struggle with the long form a great deal more than I'm aware of ...
And I have been thinking about Crossed Genres, actually, as a novel market, now that they're paying pretty solid advances. I don't think that what I have on offer right now is up their alley though, except maaaaybe one of the YAs, which is hard(ish) sci-fi about three kids stranded on an alien ocean after their parents' death. If they buy YAs, which I'm not entirely sure.
(Also, your Gay YA sounds quite awesome. :D)
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And I'm glad you liked Swanskin Song! It was actually written as payment to a prompt for a friend, and she was the one who said she'd like to see it placed somewhere. I was really happy when Expanded Horizons took it; it seemed pretty much like the best possible fit.
And man, I get the longfic writing – a lot of my personal fanfiction history falls into what I like to call sprawlingbigplotfic, because... that's what it does. (I once had grand plans to rewrite the entire cosmology of Final Fantasy VIII, as well as covering the several thousand years kinda implied and brushed aside by the game. I still kinda miss the idea of that fic.) There's something about the scale you can achieve with an epic that's just chills-inducing.
But most of the original long-form stuff I try now has... more of a defined set of plot points, or at least a single climax that I can build up to and set down from. ...which may or may not make for a marketable final product; I've finished a grand total of two original long-form works in my life, and one of those was a 60-page "novel" I wrote in middle school. <_<
I think I manage to coast on style in a lot of my short stuff; I can deploy some decently polished prose, which occasionally acts to camouflage other issues with my stories. And then I always think I'm writing really strong original character pieces, and then people write reviews going "We don't really get much of a sense of X character's personality, but..." and I go BUT HIS CHARACTER WAS SO CLEAR HOW DID THAT FAIL TO COME ACROSS? Heh. Something to study, I guess?
Short-form stuff definitely plays by its own rules.
I never manage to send anything to the Crossed Genres magazine because I'm bad at writing to prompt on deadline, which is always a little frustrating because I like their mission. Though I have promised them a historical fantasy piece which I... need to get into workable shape by the end of the month. So that will be interesting. ...I'm not sure what age ranges they look at for, either; worth a query, perhaps?
And oh, fun. Are there aliens on the alien ocean? Or is it more wilderness-survival-situation-y? (I am a sucker for wilderness survival stuff.)
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That makes a lot of sense to me! I suppose I'm still at the stage where I just want to publish aaaaaaanything, but I have heard people talk about that, and I've encountered a similar sort of stage fright with my fanfic ... which is stupid, it's FANFIC, but I've found the fear of what other people will think has just gotten worse, the more stories that I've had well received. I imagine it would be even more intense and paralyzing with original stuff, which has your real name and reputation as a pro writer attached to it.
Something to look forward to, I guess ... *facepalm*
I had a story in Crossed Genres in the really early days, before they went pro, but haven't sold anything to them since. I keep trying, though, because I have enough completed stuff floating around by now and their themes are vague enough that I can usually find something lurking in the fiction folder that fits. I think I have ... three pieces under consideration right now with them, for different months and anthologies. And they've always seemed very nice to deal with, a breath of fresh air considering what a lot of the SFF field is like.
And oh, fun. Are there aliens on the alien ocean? Or is it more wilderness-survival-situation-y? (I am a sucker for wilderness survival stuff.)
It's wilderness survival, basically. :) I always used to adore teens-in-peril survival stories when I was a kid, and this is basically that, except with a sci-fi setting. It was my NaNo novel a few years ago ... actually, come to think of it, you could read the rough draft if you wanted to; both of the years I did NaNo, I posted it as I was writing it, and I have a (now basically abandoned) DW journal for that -- which I just gave you access to:
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And yeah, I have the same thing with fanfic. (Which may be part of why everything I write has this weird ability to self-sabotage by becoming intensely uninteresting at the 80%-90% done mark. It's like it doesn't want to escape into the wild where it can be judged. And for all that, fanfic is still generally my safe space to retreat to when original fic feels too stressful.
I had a story that I was trying to put together for Crossed Genre's Fierce Families anthology, because it seemed like a relatively low-risk anthology where I didn't have to STAKE MY ENTIRE SELF WORTH on the story, or anything. And then I managed to miss the deadline, and then miss the extended deadline, and then threw my hands in the air. Oh, well. maybe one of these days I'll finish the story and send it out on the rounds; I still rather like the concept.
And awesome! I'll be sure to check the story out. (If you'd like to see more or less what I have of the Gay YA, I started an experiment to see if serializing it would push me to finish it on some reasonable timeline. So far, the conclusions seem to be "no". But again: oh well.)
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Possibly my priorities need some work.
Anyway - I will take a look! Gay cop zombies, you say? *is intrigued*
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They're not so much gay cop zombies as, well, two ladies who end up attracted to each other (though in the posted bits they haven't got beyond sniping at each other) and one of them is a cop, and there's a mystery about a disease called Hurston's going around which turns people kinda zombie-like. But "the gay cop zombie YA" seemed illustrative enough until I could think up a better title for it. Which I haven't.
Titles are evil.