I’ve made some progress on my goals. I now get to face the scarier things on my goal list. Also, some small miscellaneous news. And I will tell you about it in that order.
I managed to get my stuff sent off for the 12/31 deadline. I already received word back from Norwescon, and if I’m reading it right I think I will be in the workshop. They said my submission looked fine, they would see me at Norwescon and would let me know my schedule when it is defined. Which sounds like I’m in, but I’ve been known to be wrong before.
I also submitted my short story to Crossed Genres. Thank you to everyone who helped with reading it. I think this story had the most eyes on it of anything I’ve submitted in the past. And it mostly avoided the problem of, “A camel is a horse designed by committee.” (That’s a quote I’ve been overly fond of ever since my brief experience on a committee.) The title I chose for the submission ended up being, “With Fans Like These, Who Needs Enemies?” I’ll save “Glittershock” for when I really do write a really awful novel about fairies in Loffel, WA.
On the horizon is now the literary contest, two more short stories for Crossed Genres and potentially Clarion or Clarion West.
The contest is the most daunting of the three. The contest is for unpublished work. I’d be aiming at either the “Short Story” or “Science Fiction/Fantasy Novel” categories. Most of my unpublished short stories are, well, unpublished for a reason. In retrospect, they were fraught with problems. But, you know, if my recent short gets rejected for Crossed Genres, that may be a candidate.
The novels I have all need varying degrees of work. I never did a post-NaNoWriMo recap, but one of the things that came out of it is some different perspectives regarding scene building and story structure. So I’m feeling less confident about my previous work.
Now, I don’t need a full novel. The rules state I don’t need to have a finished novel. I just need a synopsis and excerpt. So I can conceivably broad stroke some of my revisions without having to wade in and start bushwhacking a bunch of scenes. Then it becomes a matter of deciding which novel to use. And then I need to get it ready to submit by mid-February. Eeek!
If anyone would like to help me with figuring out which novel to use, lemme know.
The short stories need to be woven in to the rest of the tangle of projects. I’ve got two ideas for the issue that is due in March, and have started writing the first of them. (It was blazing pretty bright in my head, so I figured I needed to get it on paper ASAP.)
I’m still waiting on word regarding whether I can afford Clarion/Clarion West. I did email Clarion West to see if there were issues in applying for both of them and the response I got was “No.” So that does improve my odds of getting in, assuming I can afford the higher tuition of Clarion vs. Clarion West.
Even though I don’t have the money lined up, I can at least begin thinking about the application process. In working on this post, I discovered that Clarion is principally a short story workshop and only accepts short stories with the application. Clarion West accepts both short stories and novel excerpts, but since my shorts are in better fighting shape than my novels right now, I’m inclined to use shorts for both. Then it becomes a matter of figuring out which are my best short stories within the word count requested. If anyone wants to help me go through stuff and offer feedback, it would be swell.
On top of this Clarion West asks for an essay giving my background and why I want to attend the workshop. I need to think of something more convincing than, “I’m a special snowflake who wants to write professionally and I’m, like, really really awesome.” *sigh*
My small news is that I got to see a preview of the cover for the Crossed Genres anthology I will be in, so that’s pretty exciting. I thought I had other news, but that’s mostly dispersed through the rest of the post.
