Category: Short Stories

Pluggin’ away

Wrote 2,889 words today, bringing the running 7-day total to just under 15,000 words.  If I can keep this up for a month without lagging, I should be able to finish Mercenary Savior 3.0 in time for CONduit.

In the meantime, I’m looking for a job.  A friend of mine who’s in Egypt right now told me about this interesting online freelance contractor, which looks like a promising source of cash in the short term.  Sent in my application, inshallah will hear back soon.  Payment is via paypal on a work for hire basis, with most writers / copy editors averaging $20-$25 per hour, so could be useful.  No benefits, but what the heck.

In between writing and applying with the online writing place, I submitted Genesis Earth to a couple new places, and sent From the Ice Incarnate to IGMS.  I don’t have many short stories, but I really need to send out the few I do have to more markets.  Maybe I can pull out the first couple chapters of some of my novels and call them short stories and/or novellas.  Wouldn’t hurt.

Graduation is coming up in less than 100 hours.  My parents arrived in town about an hour ago, and the rest of the family should be coming shortly.  It will be really good to see them–I’m looking forward to it.

That’s about it for now.  I’ve got some other thoughts on jobs, dating, future plans, settling down, an article I’m writing for Mormon Artist, and the computer I want to build once I’ve got a job, but I’ll write about that later.  Goodnight.

I’m published!

That’s right–my first published story just came out in issue 58 of The Leading Edge.  I am happy to say that after three years of formally pursuing my career as a writer, I am now a published author!

The story is titled Decision LZ1527, and it’s about a guy asking a girl out on a date–as told from the point of view of the little men inside his head piloting his body like a starship. I really like the tagline in the table of contents: “A man, a woman, and a whole crew of matchmakers.”

Full disclosure: I submitted this story after I joined the staff as a volunteer slushpile reader.  Most of the editors for this issue are pretty good friends of mine (including the Production Director, who’s one of my most trusted alpha readers).  I submitted it under a pseudonym, however, so most of the staff didn’t know it was mine until after they’d accepted it.

The Leading Edge is known for the excellent quality of its illustrations, and I’m happy to say that I lucked out with with the artist the editors picked for my story!  Josh McGill is a graphic designer and aspiring children’s book illustrator.  He’s done art for issues 53 and 55 of The Leading Edge. The picture on the right is the one he did for the front page of my story.  I must say, I’m impressed!

The Leading Edge is a semi-professional small press science fiction and fantasy magazine affiliated with BYU.  It’s been in publication since the early 80s, when Marion K. “Doc” Smith’s famous “class that wouldn’t die” got together and started it, along with Quark and LTUE.  If you would like to support the magazine (and read my story!) you can purchase a copy of issue 58 at the following link:

Issue 58: “Redemption Songs”

Lot’s of people dream about getting published, but it takes a lot of hard work and rejection to actually make it happen.  As writers, though, we tend to be harder on ourselves than we ought to be.  It took almost four years for Decision LZ1527 to find its way into print, but it did.  That’s enough to make the rest of the process worth it.

Let’s hope it’s the first of many!

WOTF rejection

So a couple days ago, I got a phone call from my Mom.  A piece of mail had come in from the Writers of the Future contest.

Yeah, it was a standard form rejection.

Well, everyone puts in their time.  I guess this counts toward that.  A modified version of this story did well in the Mayhew contest, so I know it’s not utterly bad.  But I can see, in retrospect, how it wouldn’t do well with WOTF.

The main body of the piece was a scene I took from the middle of my novel–really, it was more of a scene than a coherent, unified story.  I threw on a beginning and an end, to try to fix that problem, but it probably didn’t mesh well with the real meat of it.  Which is fine, because it was originally meant as a scene, not a short story.

The thing is, I’m just not much good at short stories.  I don’t usually read them, and I don’t generally write them.  Novel writing is my craft–every time I try to write a short story, I end up writing a novel.  Once and a while, something clicks and a short story pops out (kind of like a Polaroid), but it’s not the usual thing.

So I’m not discouraged by this rejection from submitting to WOTF again, it’s just that it’s going to be kind of sporadic.  I have one more short piece that I could submit to the contest right now, but I don’t expect it to go far.  Still, it’s better than letting it sit in my hard drive.

In the meantime, I should probably submit that WOTF piece elsewhere, see what happens.  That’s probably what I’ll do.

What I really need to do, though, is work on my novel.  World Fantasy is coming up!

Some updates

Just a few quick updates before I go to bed:

My short story, Decision LZ150207, is getting published in The Leading Edge! Hooray!  This will be my first publication credit.  It certainly won’t be my last!

As you can see from the progress bar to the right, I’ve started work on draft 2.2 of Ashes of the Starry Sea, the novel that I finished back in April of 2008 (my first “finished” novel–and the project that spawned this blog).  My goal is to finish this draft by August 1st, 2009.

It is a beast of a novel–I’m predicting it will be at least 150,000 words.  The draft is currently at 158,000 words, but I’m going to have to add several scenes as well as vigorously trim out the bad writing.

And boy, is there a lot of bad writing in this draft!  I knew, when I wrote it, that I wasn’t that good, but holy cow!  Way too much introspection, way too much “tell”-iness, not nearly enough concrete details.  Too many adverbs, too much wordiness, especially in the scenes with the action.  This is going to be a deep revision.

BYU’s writing conference was a blast!  I’ll try to post more about it in the near future, hopefully tomorrow if I can get around to it.  The three editors who attended are open to submissions from the conference, and one of them prefers full manuscripts to partials, so on Saturday I printed up the full 2.0 draft of Genesis Earth.

Holding the full manuscript in my hands was surreal.  It’s one thing to write it out digitally and see it on your screen, but it is something else entirely to hold the tangible, physical thing in your hands.  I just…keep wanting to hold it.  It feels so real.

But yeah, I’m kind of uneasy sending the full manuscript off to this editor, especially since she hasn’t asked me for it specifically (she just told all the conference-goers that she prefers full manuscripts).  I don’t want to get in trouble sending my full ms out to multiple places, so my game plan is to send this to her ASAP so it can get rejected within the next 1-4 months (what she claimed was her turnaround time).

Because of that, I’m sending her a draft which could be more polished, but oh well.  Anything could be more polished–eventually, you just have to send your stuff out.  Besides, as pessimistic as this might sound, I do think that my mss has a fighting chance.  We’ll see what comes of this.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Welcome to Mars, a magical world of ancient ruins like giant glass chess sets and canals of wine and sandy desert seas. A world inhabited by golden eyed people who can telepathically project hallucinations–some of them still live up in the hills. A desolate, empty world, the next frontier for a new generation of pioneering spirits, each with different dreams, different reasons, different goals and outlooks on their new life in the new world. Some come with respect and reverence to the ancient world, while others come to exploit it. But no matter why they come, everyone is deeply and profoundly changed. Some never return.

Ray Bradbury is one of the biggest names in science fiction, and this book is one of his greatest works. A lot of my friends really love Bradbury, but strangely, I haven’t read a lot of him (Fahrenheit 451, way back in Middle School, and a few essays, but that’s pretty much it). After putting this book down, all I can say is wow. Now I know what my friends were talking about.

The Martian Chronicles is more of a collection of short stories than anything else. That’s understandable, when you consider that science fiction began with short stories, not with novels. Keep that in mind as you read it, too. This is not a book you can read all in one go; you have to take time between the chapters to let each one soak in, otherwise your mind will just get overloaded. Bradbury delivers a bang! ending to just about every story in this book, and some of them are really deep. My favorite one was the one with Sender, and how the fourth rocket discovered that all the Martians were killed off by the chicken pox. There are some really profound ideas in that one, and I loved reading it.

A lot of hard sf purists tend to call Bradbury a writer of fantasy disguised as science fiction, and I can see where they’re coming from. There’s nothing really scientific about this book; the Mars of Bradbury’s stories is a purely fantastic invention (even for the 50s). I remember the story about the third rocket, and how it landed on a grassy green lawn, and all the crew stepped out and found themselves in a little Ohio town, and all I could think was “what??” It was very fantastic, very surreal and even trippy at parts, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not so bad. And really, I’d argue with the whole “Bradbury = fantasy” thing–I think some of the ideas in these stories definitely blur the line between fantasy and science fiction.

One thing Bradbury is fantastically good at is infusing all of his writing with passion. There wasn’t a moment in this whole book when I couldn’t envision Bradbury himself, his eyes wide and bloodshot, gripping me by the shoulders and shaking me. His imagery was amazing, and his twist endings were incredible. You really read Bradbury for his prose and for his ideas; everything else takes a back seat, but he does so well with the first two that that’s ok.

These are the kinds of stories that stick with you long after you’ve read them. They might not be consistent with each other or follow in a coherent, logical order, but they will deeply and profoundly move you.