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Showing posts from February, 2012

Flash Fiction Challenge -- Poison Sandwich

Yay, another challenge! You can find it here . Considering one of my known writing issues is all those scenes where my characters sit around eating, this is right up my alley. The bread was obviously poisoned. Kendra was the only one who ate the 12-grain. The child ate wonderbread, or the local grocery store's equivalent brand, because she was ten. The old woman ate that cheap white stuff too, because her gums couldn't tolerate the lumpy bits. So they had to buy two kinds of bread every time they went to the store, and often the bread went stale before it was gone, because who wants a sandwich every day. So the old woman knew Kendra was the only one who ate the 12-grain bread, and she infested it with whatever mould made the medieval people go mad, that infested their grain silos and made them hallucinate religious experiences and eventually sicken and die. The old woman knew Kendra would pick off the green bits, leaving tendrils of poison still deep in the bread to be eaten, g...

The absurd draw of non-deadline related projects

I have an essay due on Saturday. It's insane how attractive other projects are, when I have to work on that one. Tonight, if I get through a draft, I get to type up that first draft story from last week. Okay, maybe what's insane is that somehow copy typing has become a reward.

Out there -- Jan 2012

Subs in 2012: 1/52 “Bezoar”. Sent to market #4 Jan 9. “Cats”. Sent to market #1 Sept 30. This year's writing goal is to submit once a week. I have one more thing I need to get out to a market. And clearly I need to take all those first drafts I've written and maybe bash one into shape per month. That sounds so fun right now.

In process -- January 2012

First Draft “Fairfax”. Started month with 54,000 words, near the end of Chapter 20. Now it’s around 61K, in Chapter 23. Lots of stuff has happened, which is good. I’ve moved some of the characters finally out of their comfort zones, and created lots of problems for them. I think I will be going over my initial draft target of 90K. “The X Tree” (where X is whatever the tree is; When I started I hadn’t quite figured that out yet). This short story came out of a chat with another TW. And also I wanted to try e-prime. When I was at VP, Jim MacDonald went through a few pages of my manuscript and pointed out every instance of “There was” etc. I remember despairing. We’ll see if, long term, this experiment improves the quality of my first drafts. I carried this around to work and stuff with the intention of writing on it when my computer was rebooting and things like that, but it didn’t quite work out. On the weekend I just sat down and wrote until the draft was finished (total: 7000 words ...