Tag: NaNoWriMo

Year of Short Stories — Week #46 & 47

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

  • Stories in Progress – 2
  • Submissions This Week – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 5
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 28 (11 higher tier)

Happenings

It has been a busy two weeks, and I’ve been neglecting the blog. My wife and I had a double 40th birthday party, which necessitated the first thorough cleaning of the new house. We also finally finished putting away all the little things that had been neglected since the move, and added some finishing touches, like hanging pictures and paint touch-ups.

PerShoStoWriMo (my short-story-writing replacement for NaNoWriMo) was a bust. I tend to do well in these kinds of challenges when I have a good plan at the start and get ahead early. Unfortunately, I started this November a day behind, with merely a concept of a plan, and fell steadily further behind.

I did write drafts for several stories, but I’m nowhere near the original word count goal. Yes, there are still a couple days of November left, but I’m ending it here. It was fun and moderately productive, and that’s good enough.

I do still have one story, tentatively called The Loneliest Number, that’s partly done, and I may still finish it before the end of the month. However, I’ve also got other important things to do, like eat a huge Thanksgiving meal and lay on the couch.

Work in Progress

One of the things that distracted me from PerShoStoWriMo was critiquing. I did a ton of Critters critiques in November so my story, Red Eyes, could go out. Happily, I am now caught up, and I received ten responses, which is pretty good for a 6500-word story.

My next step is to compile all that feedback into a bullet-point list of bigger issues, smaller issues, and potential solutions. Then I’ll get into the revisions.

Submissions

I received two responses for previously submitted stories. My drabble, A Going Away Party, got a form rejection. Interestingly, this was a double submission to a publisher with separate handling of sci-fi and fantasy submissions. The second submission is still marked as “in progress.”

It’s always difficult to guess what’s happening with submissions, but it’s at least potentially a good sign that the second story didn’t get rejected around the same time as the first. Maybe it’s at least being held for consideration. Of course, it could just be a completely separate queue and editors for each story, and the delay doesn’t really mean anything.

The other response was from the Writers of the Future contest, for Dr. Clipboard’s Miracle Wonder Drug. It received an honorable mention, which is nice, although a little further investigation reveals that the contest has quite a few tiers below first, second and third place. There are about a dozen finalists and semi-finalists. Then there are about fifty “silver” honorable mentions, and even more regular honorable mentions beneath that.

There’s no way to determine exactly how many entries the contest gets each quarter, but it’s free to enter and has a big cash prize, so it’s certainly a lot. At least hundreds, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than a thousand. So an honorable mention has some value, but I’d peg it as similar to one of those nice rejection letters that says “we liked your story, keep trying.”

I already sent Dr. Clipboard out again, this time to an anthology with a theme that feels like a pretty good fit. A Going Away Party is a drabble and technically a reprint, which makes it a little harder to find good places to send. I may just hang on to it until I see something like a theme issue where it makes sense to submit.

Goals for Next Week

  • Finish The Loneliest Number
  • Sift through Red Eyes critiques

Year of Short Stories — Week #43

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

  • Stories in Progress – 5+
  • Submissions This Week – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 6
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 26 (10 personalized)

PerShoStoWriMo

Week one of my personal short story writing month is in the books, and it didn’t go well!

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I definitely didn’t pull NaNoWriMo “par” numbers, and I missed three days entirely. I’m currently trending toward about 50% of the goal wordcount of 50,000 words by the end of November. And yet, I’m pretty happy with my progress. I’ve blasted through drafts of four short stories so far, and I’m deep into a fifth (considerably longer) story.

I’m being productive with the time I have available. As usual I’m juggling my day job, my kids activities, and other family stuff.

Plus, I have over a week of vacation planned in November, so I may have some time to catch up. Even if I don’t, I’ll still be glad to have gotten quite a few words on the page.

Submissions

I resubmitted The Incident at Pleasant Hills, which came back to me last week.

I’m hoping that I’ll get some responses in the next month or so, but with end-of-year holidays fast approaching, I expect anything that I submit through the end of the year to be out until 2025.

Critiques

I’m still getting caught up on Critters critiques, but the end is in sight now. I’ll catch up sometime this week. This past week is actually when Red Eyes would have hit the top of the queue, so I’m not doing too bad in that regard.

Goals for Next Week

  • Get caught up on critiques!
  • Keep writing short stories for PerShoStoWriMo!

Year of Short Stories — Week #42

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

  • Stories in Progress – 1
  • Submissions This Week – 0
  • Submissions Currently Out – 5
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 26 (10 personalized)

Submissions and rejections

Once again, a fairly quiet week. I did have one bit of news: after three months of waiting, I got a rejection from Analog Science Fiction. Admittedly, I expected to receive a rejection, and I expected it to take a long time. Analog is a bit notorious for very slow submission responses. Duotrope says they average 112 days for a response, with their longest reported response time just barely squeaking in under a year!

What was surprising was that the rejection was actually encouraging. Now, this is traditional publishing, so the encouragement consists of a single sentence: “I like your style of writing and suggest that you try us again.” I think that’s what Aeryn Rudel calls The Improved Form Rejection.

Still, Analog is one of the “big three” SFF magazines, and they’ve published enough Hugo and Nebula award winners to fill a few trophy cases, so I’ll happily take whatever encouragement they give, and I will likely try them again when I have another sci-fi piece.

NaNoWriMo? No. PerShoStoWriMo!

If you missed my previous post, I’m doing something a little different for November, and I’ve given it a dumb name. My guess was that I will write 10-15 short stories this month.

I started off on the right foot by missing Day 1 completely. No words written. On days two and three, I wrote a complete story each day, and comfortably met my “par” word counts (which still leaves me a day behind).

Both of these stories were for a secret project, and I have one or two more that I’m expecting to be similarly-sized. It’s looking like 10-15 stories might be a low estimate, but I’ll have a better feel for how things are going in a week or so.

Critiques

I am still painfully aware that I’m below my ratio on Critters, and Red Eyes is languishing in the holding pen, waiting. Writing 15 other stories probably won’t help with that problem, but I have been making progress and catching up. So long as I can finish a couple per week, Red Eyes should be back in the queue before the end of November.

Goals for Next Week

  • Resend The Incident at Pleasant Hills
  • Continue critiques
  • Blast out stories for PerShoStoWriMo!

PerShoStoWriMo

It’s November, and you know what that means. It’s the month when a bunch of writers try to string 50,000 words together into something almost, but not entirely unlike a novel.

Over the years, NaNoWriMo has grown from a thing that more and more people do to a full-fledged nonprofit corporation with a website and forums and programs and email lists. Somewhere in that process, it has become apparent that this organization has a penchant for saying and doing some questionable things. The most recent controversies involved a moderator grooming minors on the forums, and a statement on AI that suggested that any stance against AI-generated writing was ableist and exclusionary.

NaNoWriMo, the Unnecessary Organization

Thankfully, we still live in a world where pretty much everyone agrees that child-predators are the scum of the earth, and the forum debacle resulted in the whole forum more or less being shut down and a major shakeup in the organization.

The statement on AI, unsurprisingly to everyone except the people making it, did not go over well with the core NaNoWriMo demographic of people who like to write things themselves. It resulted in little more than a bunch of grumpy articles across the web, a quiet backtracking of the original stance, and a response from the NaNoWriMo organization that amounted to “Oh, guys, we didn’t mean it like that.“

Rather than write my own screed about how dumb this is, I’ll just point to a pair of rants by Chuck Wendig: one about the NaNoWriMo thing in particular, and another about the problems of generative AI. I agree with about 90% of what he says on this topic, and he’s just really good at channeling angry outbursts into blog form.

I’ve done my best to ignore the NaNoWriMo organization’s antics in recent years, but I think I’m finally done with them. What will I miss out on? A not-entirely terrible online word count tracker and a Discord that I never use? It seems clear that NaNoWriMo works pretty well as a thing people do, and not so well as an organization. So let’s treat it that way from now on.

PerShoStoWriMo

This year, I’m not writing a novel, or even something vaguely similar. No, it’s my Year of Short Stories, and I’m going to spend the month attempting to write 50,000 words of short stories. To get in the proper spirit, I’ve christened the month with a new, even more insane pseudo-acronym. It’s my Personal Short Story Writing Month: PerShoStoWriMo.

The advantage of a novel-sized story idea is that I generally don’t run out of plot in 50,000 words. I write sci-fi and fantasy, where 100,000-word novels are considered to be a bit on the short side. But when it comes to short stories, I try to actually stay on the short end of the spectrum. This poses a big question.

How many stories am I going to have to write to hit 50,000 words?

I don’t know, but I can make some educated guesses. If we ignore microfiction, my stories range from around 1400 words to 6500 words. The halfway point in that range is about 4000 words, and while I probably write more stories on the shorter end of the spectrum, I also tend to write long drafts and pare them down in editing.

So, to meet my goal, I’ll most likely have to write 10-15 stories.

Hmm. It sounds a little insane when I say it like that. I’ve written fewer stories over the past year. Still, those other stories were properly edited, then critiqued, then edited again. There will be no editing this month. That goes against the ethos of PerShoStoWriMo.

I do have a few short story ideas lined up or in progress. I’ve talked about The Vine, Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, and The Scout, and I’ve got one or two others rattling around in the back of my head. I also have a secret project in the works, and this will result in another couple of stories, at least.

An Exciting November

All in all, this PerShoStoWriMo thing feels right. It’s got a ridiculous name, it will force me to get a bunch of writing done, and it’s right on the edge of what feels possible.

I’ll keep you posted throughout the month, and we’ll see how it goes.

Are you doing any writing challenges in November? Let me know in the comments.

Year of Short Stories — Week #40 and #41

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

  • Stories in Progress – 1
  • Submissions This Week – 0
  • Submissions Currently Out – 6
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 24 (9 personalized)

Mini-Update

Despite the two weeks since my last update, I don’t have a lot to report on. Stories are still out on submission. Red Eyes is queued for critique. I’m working on getting my Critters ratio back up to 75%, but it’s slow going.

I suppose the cynical and expedient thing to do would be to bang out some smaller, quick critiques just to get it done. However, I really do enjoy critiquing. When I first started with Critters, I used to struggle to write a few hundred words of (hopefully!) helpful feedback. Now I find that my critiques can easily hit a thousand words or more.

November Plans

Last year I posted daily updates for my NaNoWriMo experience. I considered doing the same thing this year and working on the second half of that same novel, but I don’t really want to put the year of short stories on hold for a month, especially in the home stretch.

Instead, I’ve decided that I’ll be sticking to the conventional NaNoWriMo goal of writing 40,000 words in a month, but attempting to hit that goal by writing short stories.

How many? As many as it takes.

Do I have enough ideas and half-finished stories for that? I guess we’ll find out together!

Goals for Next Week

  • Keep on critiquing!
  • Plan out the stories I’ll be writing in November.

Year of Short Stories — Week #38 and #39

2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

  • Stories in Progress – 1
  • Submissions This Week – 1
  • Submissions Currently Out – 6
  • Acceptances This Year – 1
  • Rejections This Year – 24 (9 personalized)

I missed last week’s update, so this will cover the past two weeks.

Submissions

As expected, Clarkesworld provided their usual speedy form rejection for The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk. I have to appreciate them as the fastest responders in professionally-paying sci-fi and fantasy, even if they are a very tough publication to get a foot in the door. I’ll keep trying.

I sent Bluefinch out again, and received no responses on other stories, despite having five other submissions out.

Red Eyes

It feels like I’ve been picking at my current story, Red Eyes, for ages, but I have made some progress. I finished this round of revisions at 6500 words. It’s still longer than I’d like, but I’ve submitted the story to Critters for critique. I’ll also be getting feedback from my local, non-internet readers.

I haven’t yet caught up on my Critters quota, but submitting this story will put me on the clock, as it won’t go out until I’m caught up. I’ll be spending my writing time doing that this week, instead of jumping into another story.

Present and Future

It’s hard to believe, but it’s week 39 of my year of short stories, and that means I’m 3/4 of the way done! In some ways I feel like I made less progress than I had originally hoped—I had plans to write a story per month—but I also feel like I’ve accomplished quite a bit. I’ve been able to submit a lot, I got a story accepted, and accumulated a pretty decent number of “near-miss” rejections. 

Writing and submitting short stories is a strange mix of the craft and business sides of writing. This year has allowed me to cycle a number of pieces through draft, critique, revision and polish, and given me useful experience finding places to submit, crafting cover letters, writing brief bios, and tweaking each manuscript to different publications’ slight variations on standard manuscript format.

I believe my writing has improved considerably over the year so far, and I’m excited to continue adding to my stable of stories, and submitting them.

I’m not certain at this point if I’m going to do something NaNoWriMo-related in November, as is my semi-regular tradition. If I do, I’ll count that as a break in my year of short stories. Alternately, I might try to stay on theme and do some sort of month-long short story challenge instead.

Goals for Next Week

  • Get caught up on critiques!
  • Figure out what I’m doing in November

State of the Blog — Aug 2024

Amazingly, it has been almost four years since I started this blog. It has become such a part of my life that I have a hard time remembering the days when I didn’t send my thoughts out to the internet on a semi-weekly basis.

I strive to document my process, if only for the curiosity of other writers—from my Razor Mountain project documenting the first draft of a novel, to my NaNoWriMo series, to my current series where I’m spending the year writing and submitting short fiction.

My “State of the Blog” posts document the blog itself. I used to do these every six months, but I switched to a yearly schedule in 2023.

Previous Posts

Metrics

  • Years blogging: 4
  • Total posts: 473
  • Total followers: 149
  • Monthly views: 299 (average over last 3 months)

The Year of Short Stories…and Less Blogging

The fairly obvious narrative when comparing the stats to 2023 is that the blog has slowed down considerably. In my first three years, I averaged 126 posts per year, which is about 2.5 posts per week. This year, I produced only 95 posts, or 1.8 posts per week, and the daily posts during last year’s NaNoWriMo even skew that a bit higher compared to the rest of the year. Sheer posting volume isn’t the be-all, end-all for a blog, but it does have an impact. All other things being equal, more posts make the stats go up.

I did plan to reduce my post frequency in 2024, although I ended up posting even less than I planned. Part of that was the intrusion of non-writing priorities. I moved to a new house, and my family and day job have kept me plenty busy.

Part of it was that I didn’t have a project like Razor Mountain, which lent itself to frequent posts. My “Year of Short Stories” series was, in some ways, the replacement for my Razor Mountain series, but that’s one post per week and occasionally less.

Another explanation for these statistics is the sort of content I’ve been posting. Razor Mountain (and the NaNoWriMo series, to some extent) had the advantage of an ongoing story to bring readers back on a regular basis, as well as the “development” portions that were more focused on the writing process. I’m very purposely excluding my actual fiction from my “Year of Short Stories” series, because you can’t sell first rights to a story if it’s already been publicly published—even on a blog. I’m writing approximately the same amount, but less of it is blog fodder.

I also don’t expect that “Year of Short Stories” is always the most exciting content for my readership. I hope it provides some value, if only for writers to compare to their own experiences and expectations, but I do it partly for myself. It gives me a record of what I’ve been working on, and motivates me to keep making progress every week.

New Content

Seeing the WordPress graphs go up is not the most important thing in the world, but I would like to feel that I’m providing something interesting for more readers. To that end, I have been thinking about how to spruce up the blog and post more. However, I am still committing the bulk of my writing time to work that isn’t going up on the blog. I think it’s the only way to progress my writing career. So, I want to post more things that readers like. I just don’t want it to take too much time or effort. Easy, right?

My first new experiment is the Story Idea Vault series, which started this past week. I’m excited about this, because I think most writers like prompts and ideas, and these are easy posts to write. I have huge documents full of story ideas, so I could write weekly posts for years without running out. This also gives me a good excuse to do a little brainstorming every week or two, in order to come up with new ideas.

And while I haven’t been posting as much in 2024, I’ve developed a backlog of half-finished posts. I may put a little more time into finishing some of those to give the blog more life. Still, what I would really like to find is another ongoing series that focuses more on the craft side of writing, as these are the type of posts that have mostly been MIA in the past year.

Razor Mountain

I was recently contacted by one of my old beta readers for Razor Mountain, wondering about the status of the story. I was a little sad to tell them that it’s effectively on hiatus.

As much as I enjoyed the experiment of writing a novel in public, the first draft is really only half of the work. To make it the best book it can be, I would need to dedicate months of effort to revision and critique. That would be a nice second act to the Razor Mountain series, and I do think it’s important to shed light on that part of the process. There is depressingly little writing about the struggles of editing and revision (and not just the grammar and copy-editing parts).

Unfortunately, writing Razor Mountain in public means that it would be very difficult to get a traditional agent or publisher interested in it. Unless the blog suddenly blew up and got millions of views, traditional publishing doesn’t want something that people have already seen. And despite my best efforts, I just can’t get myself excited about self-publishing.

I understand, at an intellectual level, that self-pub is a significant chunk of the landscape these days, and that it’s the way that many authors make their careers. Even so, I grew up in the era where traditional publishing was the only game in town, and I still have a certain…romanticism?…bias?…toward trad pub. Could I feel satisfied with a physical copy of my book, if I hadn’t first convinced a jaded, chain-smoking agent and an overworked, sassy editor that the book was worth spending time and money on? I don’t know. Say what you want about my biases, but we all have to follow the path that feels right. For me, that doesn’t include self-publishing, at least for now.

I haven’t given up on properly finishing Razor Mountain, but I won’t be picking it up again in 2024. I’m enjoying writing short fiction and getting involved in all the aspects of writing from idea to submission. It’s fun and satisfying to produce a heap of stories in the time that one novel would take. That doesn’t mean Razor Mountain is dead. It’s sleeping. I just need to figure out how to get excited about it again.

Thanks for Reading!

If you’re one of my regular (or even occasional) readers, know that you’re appreciated. As writers, we’re all throwing words out into the world and hoping that someone will read them. You doing that for me may not feel like much, but it’s nice to be heard.

If you have any thoughts about Words Deferred, or more generally, what you’re looking for or enjoying in blogs, feel free to drop a comment and let me know.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 30 Wrap-up

November is over, and so is NaNoWriMo. If you participated, I hope it was fun and you hit your target word count.

If you’re new to NaNoWriMo, it’s worth noting that it’s more than just the big November event. The “Now What?” Months are January and February, where participants are encouraged to finish, revise, or work toward publishing their NaNoWriMo novel. Camp NaNoWriMo happens in April and July, and encourages pursuing more flexible goals, whether that be starting a new project, finishing an existing one, working on editing, or whatever you like.

There is also the unofficial community tradition of NaNoEdMo, when some ‘WriMo-ers try to get in 50 hours of editing (or however much you feel like) in March. Unfortunately, while there have been several fan-maintained sites in the past, they all appear to be defunct. However, the NaNoWriMo website can still be used to create a new project for the month. Just set a goal of 50 “words” and treat them as hours of editing, or set it to 3000 “minutes” if it feels better to have a bigger, more granular number.

I’m currently thinking I will try to finish my NaNoWriMo 2023 project in one of the Camp NaNoWriMo months, but for now I want to get back to some other things, like revisions on Razor Mountain. I’m also thinking about new big project for 2024.

Thanks for hanging out with me this November. I’ll see you all in December, when I get back to my regularly scheduled programming.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 29

  • Writing Time: 00:45
  • Session Word Count: 972
  • Total Word Count: 50110 (48333 par)

I had a light session today to hit my 50,000 words. Success!

Purely in terms of hitting my word count every day, NaNoWriMo 2023 felt pretty good. Some days were certainly easier than others, but I only missed my quota on a single day, and my strategy of writing a little extra each day meant that I never fell behind and I was able to finish a day early. Now I can spend the final hours of November doing some wrap-up and jotting down notes for the next time I work on this project—because it’s definitely not done, and I’m going to set it aside for now.

The story itself feels like a mixed bag, but that’s generally how I feel about any work in progress. This one will definitely be a rougher first draft than Razor Mountain, because I went into it with less of an outline and followed a few tangents that may or may not make it into the final product. I do feel like I was able to discover a few important elements of the story that will become important, so I feel good about that.

Blogging through every single day of NaNoWriMo was surprisingly fun. I didn’t exactly plan to do it, but once I started, it felt right to keep going. It never really felt like an extra burden, and it was nice to talk about what I was working on. Somehow, even though I’ve been reflecting on the writing process in this blog for several years, I’m still caught by surprise when it ends up being useful.

It helped that these were easy entries to write. They were much shorter than my usual posts and completely off the cuff. I was honestly surprised by how many people came back most days to read them. If you’re one of those people, leave a comment and let me know what you thought.

This was the most posts I’ve written in a month by a huge margin, but don’t expect me to keep it up. Next month I’m going back to my usual style of fewer, slightly longer posts.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 28

  • Writing Time: 01:30
  • Session Word Count: 1728
  • Total Word Count: 49138 (46667 par)

I got an earlier start tonight, but I’m feeling burned out. I’m glad the end is approaching, because I would have a hard time keeping this pace indefinitely. However, I used to find it almost impossible to write every day, or even on a regular basis; so I’ve apparently improved.

This session was heavy on the main character sneaking around. He has now encountered some of the villain’s henchmen, and I decided to dress them in classic black uniforms with red armbands. Sure, it’s a hacky shorthand for bad guys, but that’s okay. One of the inspirations is James Bond, and that series has no shortage of ostentatious, over-the-top villains and henchmen. In fact, maybe I should lean into that even more than I have been.

I was really excited at this late point in the month to accidentally come across a story element that I really like—an aesthetic for the magic. I’m starting to think this magic is less like classic high-fantasy wizards or D&D and more eldritch. It’s an invading force that isn’t compatible with the “normal” world. Doing serious magic twists the laws of physics, and physics gets really pissed off about that.

This introduces a fun element of side-effects to big spells, which is that the world produces an opposing force in response to them. You might be able to throw a fireball, but it drops the temperature in the room by a hundred degrees. You could bend space and walk through a solid wall, but the house might split in half.

So, happy with my progress and tired out, I decided it wasn’t worth it to push through the final 1000 words tonight. I should have an easy time hitting my 50000 tomorrow.