accomplishments
Jul. 16th, 2003 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI have run errands.
As part of my errand-running, I have lobbed out TWO (count 'em, TWO) turnips, the new novella and the older novella that's been giving me fits marketwise. I finally just said, Fuck it. It can't get published if I don't send it anywhere, and picked a market for horror that accepts 10k novellas. I feel bloody-minded but triumphant.
This makes eleven stories that are out and circulating (meaning that I'm not embarrassed to own up to them in public), plus the eight that have already sold. I mention this only because three years ago, I would have told you with absolute sincerity that I couldn't write short stories at all. Irony. Good for the blood.
I don't know what happened. I'd been trying and failing to write short stories since high school, trying and failing, trying and failing. And then it was like somebody threw a switch in my brain, and I understood how to do it. Not that every story I've written since has been successful (*hollow laugh*), but it's like striking out occasionally versus not knowing which end of the bat to hold.
It came to me in a dream. And I wish I were speaking metaphorically or myth-making or something, but I'm not. I had a dream that presented a complete action, to use a creative-writing book phrase that might as well have been in Sanskrit for all the sense I had ever gotten out of it; I woke up thinking, That's a short story and wrote it down before I lost my nerve. That story is not entirely successful--I'm rewriting it in fits and starts because I know a bunch of ways it can be better--but it leveraged the lock open. I kept writing the damn things. The second short story I wrote after my small epiphany was the first story I sold, a year and a quarter ago.
And I still can't explain what happened. But I'm not arguing with it.
As part of my errand-running, I have lobbed out TWO (count 'em, TWO) turnips, the new novella and the older novella that's been giving me fits marketwise. I finally just said, Fuck it. It can't get published if I don't send it anywhere, and picked a market for horror that accepts 10k novellas. I feel bloody-minded but triumphant.
This makes eleven stories that are out and circulating (meaning that I'm not embarrassed to own up to them in public), plus the eight that have already sold. I mention this only because three years ago, I would have told you with absolute sincerity that I couldn't write short stories at all. Irony. Good for the blood.
I don't know what happened. I'd been trying and failing to write short stories since high school, trying and failing, trying and failing. And then it was like somebody threw a switch in my brain, and I understood how to do it. Not that every story I've written since has been successful (*hollow laugh*), but it's like striking out occasionally versus not knowing which end of the bat to hold.
It came to me in a dream. And I wish I were speaking metaphorically or myth-making or something, but I'm not. I had a dream that presented a complete action, to use a creative-writing book phrase that might as well have been in Sanskrit for all the sense I had ever gotten out of it; I woke up thinking, That's a short story and wrote it down before I lost my nerve. That story is not entirely successful--I'm rewriting it in fits and starts because I know a bunch of ways it can be better--but it leveraged the lock open. I kept writing the damn things. The second short story I wrote after my small epiphany was the first story I sold, a year and a quarter ago.
And I still can't explain what happened. But I'm not arguing with it.
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 02:18 pm (UTC)(how do turnips fuck?)
I fear I won't get anything else sent out this year, unless I finish up this one erotica piece for an anthology it is only dubiously suited for. Otherwise, the long thing is eating my time. I have no desire to write anything else, which sucks, since I'm doing two reviews for next month...
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 02:39 pm (UTC)Congrats on breaking the length block - it sounds like you've well and truely shattered that baby.
- hossgal
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 02:55 pm (UTC)I find it is much more difficult to wallow in angst if I think about submissions as turnips. So it's weird, but it helps.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 03:15 pm (UTC)I feel lucky to get a complete feeling. Then again, I know I can't write short stories. My Liavek stories are just a concealed novel.
I felicitate you.
Pamela
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 03:18 pm (UTC)Well, um. Sort of. I think. At least, after waking up from that dream, I understood what that phrase meant. I don't know how well (if at all) I achieve it in practice.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 06:00 pm (UTC)One of your stories has been nominated for an award. You can do it, OK?
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 06:24 pm (UTC)Thanks.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-17 07:21 am (UTC)Luck with the turnips. I had been envisioning you lobbing them with a trebuchet, but after a post like this I think the particle accelerator in Fermilab might be an apter image.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-17 08:11 am (UTC)A while back (years at this point, I suppose), we watched the PBS special on trebuchets, where a bunch of teams of people built them and hurled rocks with them in a competition, and I was absolutely smitten.
So it has to be a trebuchet. I insist. :)