Tuesday, March 10, 2009

State of the Submissions

I have stuff out to the following places:  Wet Ink, Writers of the Future, Brain Harvest, F&SF, and Byzarium.   Oddly, four of the five are flash fiction subs, and the fifth is one of my shorter short stories, though not quite a flash.  Considering that flash is the form I find the most difficult to write, this is rather kewl and strange and funny.  It also means that I really need to work on those longer length short stories, and I really need to get some agent subs out there.  Right now I have no queries out.  None.  

After an edit I sent out a short, the one that INK looked at recently, to Lucky Labs.  Now C.S. can, if she likes, pick apart my editing style.  

I keep meaning to work on T.E.P. (aka the weird bird story) but it's a daunting project. I didn't mean for it to have parallel plots of equal weight that dovetail at the end into a (not quite there) uneasy ending.  It's so much easier to edit on Masks or one of the other novels.  That's telling to my level of (un)skill with short stories--I can dive into a novel and play for hours and the time seems to zip by, but when I approach a short story I feel like I'm handling a cactus and I don't have gloves on.  The minutes crawl by.  The only thing that's easy about editing a short story is that I can scan through the thing in just a few minutes and get a good sense of the overall pace.  That's a handy thing to be able to do.  I suppose it would be possible to do with a novel, skimming over the chapters almost as fast as a flip book, relying on intimate memory to get a sense of the overall feel.  It's something that would require practice, I think, and it wouldn't take a trivial amount of time.

I've mailed my deposit for Dean Smith's Master's Class coming up this fall.  Amazing how not that long ago it seemed that the class had been put off until the distant future, a future that now appears to be racing up on me.  I've started reading the required books for the class.  The first one is a pleasant surprise--definitely not one I would have picked up on my own.  I'm glad Dean recommended that we start with ones we're least likely to read.

So that's the state of Kami's writing.  I hope we'll meet this Friday on schedule.  See some or none of you then!


3 comments:

C. Jane Reid said...

I had been wondering what happened to that master class. I'm glad to see you are still going! Good luck with the submissions!

C.S. said...

"I can dive into a novel and play for hours and the time seems to zip by, but when I approach a short story I feel like I'm handling a cactus and I don't have gloves on. The minutes crawl by."

YES! YES! You nailed my thoughts on both exactly!

Kami said...

Hey Ris, thanks! Yeah, it's pricey but it'll be worth it. I just hope we can still afford it by the time it comes around. The instructors very kindly offer full refunds up to a time very close to the class, because they understand teh suk that is the economy right now. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I won't have to back out.

A flash just came back w/o any nice stuff like an H.M. from WotF, so it's time to send it off elsewhere. I'm aiming it toward a market I'm really fond of but haven't had much luck with. And now I have to decide what to send to WotF for next quarter. We have until the end of the month, folks, so if you haven't sent in a sub for this quarter yet, get going!!