Posts Tagged ‘short story’

It appears you can read issue #19 for free. This is an excellent chance to get a taste for the type of fiction M-BRANE SF publishes. I’m excited to be in this issue with so many other talented writers.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

Shawn Scarber: “Burnt Benediction”
Bart Leib: “Flip the Switch”
Ian Sales: “Through the Eye of a Needle”
Jacques Barbéri (tr. Michael Shreve): “Isanve”
Jason S. Ridler: “4×40 Killers”
Regan Wolfrom: “A Step Beyond the Rain”

I’m moving back to North Arlington at the first of April. That’s right, I’ll be right down the street from the Cowboy’s Stadium and just a few minutes away from my kiddo. Other personal things of note: I’ve been following a high raw diet and losing a few pounds and feeling great. Additionally, I’ve started the couch to 5k in an attempt to get myself back to regularly running.

Writing-wise, I’m still reading a lot, but mostly short stories now. I think I’ve learned enough about screenwriting now to know I pretty much need to be in Hollywood to make a successful go at it. I know there are plenty of people who write from Ohio and other non-LA places, but it’s something I’d rather do correctly. I’ll keep reading scripts and studying good movies, but won’t go for being an actual screenwriter until I’m free to move to Cali.

So that means I’m back to writing short stories. I’m actually excited about this. I think studying the structure of screenplays has taught me how to recognize structure. I can now actually analyze other short stories and see their structure. It’s typically much simpler in short stories.

My next post will likely come in April with notes on my progress. I’ll also get back to submitting my work to short story markets.

Progress on ‘Restless’:

After sitting on ‘Restless’ for a few weeks, I gave it a read this weekend with my critical reviewer’s hat on. Overall, I’m still happy with it. The story is doing what I want it to do.

I decided to cut a few large sections. I cut the entire first scene, which might leave the reader in the dark about some of the main character’s motivations, but in a way that might work out. I also cut out a section of the scene that I initially liked when I wrote it, but upon a cooler reading found it to be an obvious button pusher bordering on melodrama.

With those scenes cut, I gave it another read and then added a very small section to help give the ending a little more believability. My last bit of criticism was the prose. I used so much passive voice that I’m now in the process of writing a whole new draft.

I think I did a good job of capturing the character’s voice in the story, but if you’re going to read a 10k story, it shouldn’t feel like 25k. Additionally, I’ve found with the redraft that I can leave a lot of the description out.

I’m beginning to feel like the part of me who wants to get story down and deal with conflict is completely different than the part of me who wants to write pretty words.
So I think I will always need a prose draft. And that’s ok. It lets me relax a little more when writing my first draft.

Progress on ‘War Dogs of Mars’:

I’m still working on pre-writing. I have a pretty descent looking outline taking shape. I should say outlines, because I build an outline for each POV character. I have four POVs in this story.

I’m taking my time with this phase. I usually don’t. I normally rush to get an outline, knowing it will change while I’m writing. I know this one will change as well, but I’m not really outlining the plot, I’m outlining the various character journeys and how these journeys will change and shape the characters and their relationships.

Fly by the seat of their pants writers probably think that sort of preplanning is crazy, but it does work for me on a certain level. What I’m attempting to do is get myself down to three drafts. The first draft will go to my experts. I’ll take their feedback and make revisions based on their suggestions and then write a new draft [this is more of a cut and paste rewrite].

That’s the draft I’ll likely get a workshop member to read. I might make some changes based on that reader’s feedback and then start the actual redraft. That’s the one I do for prose. I have a plan for the prose in this novel. The separate POVs will all have their own distinct style. Nothing too gimmicky, because honestly, I hate it when the writing isn’t somewhat transparent, but I also hate it when the characters aren’t distinguished in some way through the language and writing. I know, picky bastard, aren’t I?

So I’m making some progress.

OK, so I’m stealing my heading selections from Elizabeth Bear. Well, not her titles exactly, but the concept of posting sections of lyrics from songs. However, I’m picking obscure songs from obscure bands, which might make me elite or just a huge nerd. Yeah, huge nerd is what I thought as well.

I worked a little on the Edgar Allen Poe vs the Murloc story last night. The voice in this one is tricky, so it’s taking a little longer just to get words down on paper. I’ll have to keep it a short one just for that reason. I’m real close to having another story out to market. Work has been stressing me out lately, because of course I’ve been given very little time to do a project that they changed three or four times, and now they want it delivered to QA. However, it ain’t even working yet. I’m getting close to finishing, but just don’t have the old drive to work all night that I used to have. I’m just getting too old for that crap.

I must have fixed some programming in my head. I had a real hard time there for a while where all I could come up for story ideas were subjects and events that would take way longer than a short story to tell. I think I might have managed to get my brain wrapped around the 2-4k story length. I wrote a 1500 word one Saturday night and now I’m working on one that will likely come in around 3k, and I have a hard science fiction in the notes that will likely come in around 4-5k. This is a nice place to be.

I think I’ve got that sized plotting down to something pretty simple. One event. Of course, you have to sort of understand what the event is. And it can be somewhat ambiguous as to what you should explore when exploring the one event, but it’s not exactly a science like sword making or anything. You just have to fiddle around with it until it works right.

Like my Edgar Allen Poe vs the Murloc is basically about a character finding the beach of lost items, seeing his sister’s beloved comb, and having to battle a fish dude who is going through some initiation to get it from the top of a steep cliff wall [that actually sounds like a lot of events, but the big event idea for me was that some guy on the beach would find a comb and need to battle for it]. The hard science fiction one is even easier–a team of astronauts/scientists must deal with debris from a passing meteoroid. A lot can come from these events, but this is the way I’ve started thinking of short fiction. It’s one major event to explore. My character still wants something, still works to pursue something, and still runs into obstacles, but they normally center on this event.

Maybe when I’ve put a little more thought into it, and developed and sold a few stories with this way of thinking about story, I’ll expand on it. I’m just glad I have some clearer direction now.

I feel like I’m in a good place. I could probably do a story a week or more. I think now I just need to learn to balance my writing time with my reading time. I listen to a lot of stories on podcasts, but I don’t think it’s quite the same as seeing words on paper. I think if you’re a writer you need to see words written on paper by people who know what they are doing as often as possible.

Well, I don’t want to go to work, but pretty much have to. I’ll try to post here more often. I’ll try to keep the topics focused on the fiction as much as possible.

Fiction excerpt from latest WIP:

In those final days when my sister Balentine lay pale in her emerald bedding, coughing out the last of her young life in droplets of blood on lace kerchiefs, and relatives from as far away as the Carolinas made the journey by rail to see her off, I found myself so distracted I wandered to a beach yet unexplored, even in the times of my most curious youth.