Monday, April 30, 2012

Around the May-Pole: A Nearly-Coherent Writing Update


May is shaping up to be an exciting month. Three of my short stories will appear in some seriously awesome magazines. I learned yesterday that my story, “Deerslayer”, has been accepted by Nine Magazine, and will appear in their second issue to be released in late May. (You can get the nine fantastic stories in Issue One now for $5. It’s totally worth it.)

This is in addition to “Flatland” - which is scheduled to appear in the May issue of Jabberwocky - and “The Deep”, which will appear in the May issue of Flash Fiction Online. “The Deep” is my first (and thus far only) professional-paying sale.

Needless to say, I’m chuffed to see the words I’ve sweated and bled over (not literally…perhaps) get into the hands of readers. I’ll put a note up here when each of the stories are available.

Submitting short fiction is an exciting, excruciating, time-consuming, obsessive process. If I’d tallied the number of times I checked my email for replies, I’d have covered the desk, walls, and possibly the carpet with faint pencil lines. The road from initial idea to rough story to finished story to rejection to acceptance to actual, honest-to-god publication is potholed, meandering, and stretches way, way back into the heat-blurred distance.

It has been an educational, and often frustrating, experience. But it has also been an awful lot of fun.

In secondary news, I completed the fifteenth chapter of my novel WIP this past week, which means I've struggled my way very close to the halfway point (per my outline, which is rather vague and liable to morph into different shapes altogether). Either way, it’s a milestone, and one I’m satisfied with. Though I’m struck with a faint disquiet that not enough is happening at this point in the book. Ah well, it’s nothing that can’t be fixed in revisions.

6 comments:

  1. how exciting. congrats on publication news. i am in the submitting/rejection cycle right now so i totally understand about the checking you email way too often. nightmarish but necessary, right?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Valerie! It is frustrating, and sometimes disastrous on the ego. Stay with it, and don't lose heart in a story you believe in. And don't be afraid to revise.

      Delete
  2. It's a lovely feeling and puts rejection into perspective - for a time : ) Congrats

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Mike. What you say is very, very true. Each acceptance high lasts until...oh, the next rejection letter (especially those painful impersonal form rejections), or maybe the one after that. Sometimes I need to step away and ask WHY I write, and the answer is that I do it because it is so challenging. If it wasn't, I suspect we'd all grow bored with it very quickly.

      Delete
  3. Congrats on the upcoming publications! Finally getting our work into readers' hands makes all the hard work worthwhile.

    Wishing you a very productive #writemotivation month,
    Jocelyn

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Jocelyn. Thanks for stopping by. It IS exciting to finally get some stories out there, after all the work and worry. My #writemotivation month has started slowly, but hopefully will pick up this coming week. I'm looking forward to it. I'm also hoping your own #writemotivation goals are met and exceeded! Good luck!

      Delete