My writing

I often hesitate to give any kind of specific update here, mostly because when I'm asked what I'm up to with my writing (usually by someone who isn't a writer) I am able to answer in the same way: "I'm writing." I could get into specifics about the story that I'm working on or the fact that the ending of the novel I'm trying to finish seems locked inside a Fort Knox style secure location, but most of the time I get blank, glossy stares after a few minutes of this. Most of the people around me just don't want to hear the specifics anymore. Unless there's a particular problem with something or a really clever idea I have (I know, beware cleverness), there really just isn't that much to tell people. Writing is a solitary habit.

But here today I'm going to talk about two projects that I'm considering taking on for good or for ill: a short story collection, and a website.

This isn't a website, it's a blog. A website might have a "News" section, but this is still where I post the insane ramblings. They will be linked. The website would be more for information about me as a writer, links to all of my stuff and to create a true web presence. The question is: Is it really going to do anything positive for me? Well, that sort of brings me to my next section.

I've been thinking about collecting my short stories for a while now, but recently I actually added up word counts and I'm getting close to the 40,000 word minimum. I'd like it to be something closer to 50-60k, but we'll see what happens.

These two ideas go together because a website helps promote and sell the book (and any future books) and the book will hopefully direct people to the website where they'll learn about other things I'm working on, read my blog, etc. The ideal situation is a positive spiral where eventually everyone understands what kind of a brilliant writer I am. Or not.

Maybe I'm just looking for an excuse to learn how to program in Python.

Point of View

I wrote a story a while ago in 2nd person perspective. You see, when I was a Creative Writing major, we had an exercise in a class that forced us to write a scene from a story in all three points of view: First (I'm doing something), Third (He/she is doing something), and the not-often-used-but-when-it-is-it's-usually-terrible Second person (You are doing something). Now, as I said, 2nd person is usually done very poorly. However, I had the misfortune of having a professor (a really good one, by the way) who believed in me and thought that this particular exercise demonstrated that I understood how to properly write in 2nd person perspective, and she told me this. This is unfortunate because now I have it in my head that I'm capable of using this oft misused point of view, and now I have a story that is probably nearly unpublishable. It's been rejected two or three times already (not that much, I know) but I think that the number could grow by a factor of 10 or 20 before I finally try to include it in a short story collection of all my stories, published and unpublished. Honestly, I think it's a great story, but the weird perspective might mean that this doesn't matter, unless I find an editor that hasn't yet been bombarded by terrible 2nd person perspective stories. Maybe I'm wrong and this is just such a terrible 2nd person story, and I'm only contributing to the problem.

For an example of a really good 2nd person story, Google Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer". You'll be glad you did.

So, ultimately, my advice in this post is that unless you are Lorrie Moore, don't write a story in second person point of view. If you do, prepare to get it rejected over and over and over.

Waiting for Responses

I think that possibly the worst thing about writing is the submission process and the waiting for a response. Well, it's possible that repeated rejections are worse than the waiting, but I feel like I have some measure of control over that. When it comes to repeated rejections, I feel that a few things can be done: revise it so it's better, find another place that is better suited to it, or put it away and accept that it was good practice, but not a great result. Finding the right place seems to be most important, since revising and editing a piece should go without saying.

So we come to waiting for a response. I have been guilty at times of finding and submitting to markets that respond quickly (or say that they respond quickly) even if I don't think that my story is a good fit for a story. I find the wait to be nigh unbearable at times. Currently, I have two stories that are out there that I anticipate receiving a response sometime this summer. A third is being revised and will be sent out to wait 3 months when it's ready. All this amounts to a whole lot of down time for those stories.

I understand that magazines get a lot of unsolicited submissions and that there are reasons for the long delay, but that doesn't make it easier to take.

Since I'm currently in school (again, hopefully for the next-to-last time) I find that I relate time to other things, like my daughter's age at the time that such-and-such will be completed. This has bled over into my submissions, too. I think things like "She'll be crawling when I get this one back." While it tends to keep things in perspective, it's still hard to wait so long.

I guess this isn't really an earth shattering post, but I wanted to share. Really, 3 months isn't that long in any kind of grand-scheme time line, but it can seem like forever at times.