Market, Edit, Revise
My apologies to those still waiting to hear from me by email. Despite the fact that I am now completely finished with school and all school-related things for a few months, this past while has been incredibly busy. Not bad busy, just ... busy. I spent most of today cleaning in preparation for the house to be put on the market. And I still have a surprising amount of unpacking to do; who knew I had so much stuff at York?
I realized a few days ago that all my stories have come home; I have nothing under consideration anywhere. This hasn't happened to me since I started submitting. I might not have a huge collection of stories to market, but I have enough. This is just laziness on my part. So I've been trying to figure out where to send things next.
"Loving the Bomb" is giving me one hell of a time. I received some really good market recommendations for it, recently, though the word count has disqualified it for all of them. If anyone can think of a market that might be interested in an 8000-word, slightly surreal SF story about war (and it's not F&SF, Asimov's or WotF), please let me know. Seriously!
And things have still been limping along terribly on the writing front and I can't figure out why. Does anyone want to hear about this? I truly don't know. I've been avoiding putting up any writing angst in the past while because ... well, why? Will writing about not writing really help?
But just plain not writing is no longer an option. I have work to do, even if it's not creating new material. My task for the evening, then, is some editing and revision. I've put "The Baby Tree" (a true classic, that) on the cutting block. If "Drowned Men" and "She is ELR" both hover around the 4000-word mark, then there is absolutely no good reason for "The Baby Tree" to be 5000 words or more. That's just sloppy writing. Cut, cut, cut!
I've been pondering revising "For Life" and "Two in Red" as well … though I have to wonder if there really is a point. Those two are old. Very old. And they owe me nothing. Truly, those two stories have given me a lot already. Most notably, their combined power won me a scholarship a few years back that gave me far more money than all of my other sales combined. "For Life" was an honourable mention in the Writers of the Future contest a few years back, and "Two in Red" helped get me into Clarion. Is there still a point in marketing these two? I don't know. I guess the question is, do I still feel a need to have them read?
I'm still pondering that one.
