- Today is the last day of November and that makes it 30 days since I started my attempts to write 500 words of fiction every day. How’d I do? I think the results were mixed. 500 words/day for 30 days is 15,000 words of fiction for the month. By those standards, I did just fine. I wrote a total of 15,424 words which puts me almost a full day over my target. On the other hand, I only wrote on 21 days out of the 30 days in the month, or slightly more than two-thirds. I would prefer more consistency in terms of writing every day. That said, it is more fiction-writing than I’ve done in a long time and it feels good to be writing fiction.
- Early this morning, I was skimming through my story idea notes and came across one that I’d jotted down a while back. For some reason, it caught fire with me and I sat down to start the story–and kept going. In the end, I had a 900 word flash fiction piece which I thought was pretty darn funny. I proofread it, edited it a bit, and then sent it off. It felt good to write a whole story, to finish a piece of fiction with a beginning, middle and end, even if it was only 900 words long. And it was my first unsolicited submission since April.
- The act of finishing a story was like some kind of catalyst that opened a floodgate. I had an early lunch today and my intention was to sit down and read more of “Second Stage Lensmen” in the November 1941 Astounding. Then I thought to myself, let me just jot a few notes first. Remember that novella that I’ve been struggling with forever? And remember how I said I finally found the right voice? Well, I wanted to make few notes about some events that needed to happen in the story. So I opened up OmniOutliner on my iPad and started making a few notes and before I knew it, I had virtually vomited a complete outline with just the right amount of detail, that tells thew hole story–and I love it! Now I can’t wait to get to work on it and I suspect that I’ll have this story finished up before the end of the year.
- Back in September, I sold 2 novelettes to the good folks at 40K Books. The first one, “If By Reason of Strength…” was published as an e-book not long after. I’m not certain of the schedule for the second story, which is called, “In the Cloud” but one thing I can say is that I have been working on some revisions to this story and plan to get it back to the editor this weekend. I like this story a lot, by the way, and I’m anxious to see what people think once it is released.
Writer, Coder, Avid Reader
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