Progress Notes

Southern Fried Weirdness:

Today, I responded to three submissions to Southern Fried Weirdness. I’m still running behind where I like to be as far as response times go (running a little under 2 months on average for fiction, often within weeks for poetry), but people are sending me such great stuff, I’m having a tough time making final decisions. I’m amazed and flattered by the quality of submissions I get and the caliber of writer sending them my way. Thank you all of you. Your stories make this worthwhile for me.

To keep the workload bearable, I may have to go to submission periods soon.

The Fall edition is coming together nicely. I’ve got all the poems lined up. I’m formatting pages and working on artwork. I’ve accepted two stories and will most likely reprint some classic SFW in the next issue, but this slot may be filled by one of the original stories sent my way. I’m still tring to decide about the third piece of fiction for this issue.

My Writing

I’ve hit "The Wall."

"The Wall" is a runner’s lingo for the psychological block that prevents athletes from finishing an endurance contest. This is what makes novel writing such a challenge for me, and why I have three unfinished, near novel length works sitting on the shelf collecting dust. It wasn’t until I wrote Forest for the Trees that I was able to push myself through that wall. Since then, I haven’t looked back and I finished the first two novels in my current series I’m working on with barely a snag. But my fear of hitting this wall has prevented me from subbing out those first two books and delayed me from starting this work. I’m terrified of  having something else out there I can’t finish, and these books deserve a solid resolution.

Flash fiction is like a sprint for me. I can just let myself go and its refreshing. Its over before it hurts.
 
Short fiction and novellas are like a 5k. I get tired and sometimes get a cramp before the story’s over, but I usually finish stories pretty quickly and once again, only hurt afterward when I start editing.

Novel fiction is a marathon. It takes a lot more preparation than other forms of fiction, and there’s a lot more opportunities for things to go wrong. You eventually reach that point where you think you can’t go on anymore, and think about quitting. That’s where I’ve been the last couple of weeks, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to write through it. I got in 3000 words this week and the work is at about 60,000 words now per Word Perfect, just 5,000 words shy of where I ended the other stories. But here’s the problem…. The other three books didn’t have to have resolution, they were more of a set-up for this book. This one must have resolution. It’s looking to be a lot longer than the other two books, but I guess that’s okay.

We’ll see. When writing the last book, I was stuck near the end and thought I had a lot further to go, but then the ending jumped out at me, went down on paper, and it was over.
 
Currently Reading: Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Sidon (and loving it!)