I’ve decided to stop listening to EscapePod and PodCastle, and there’s no reason you need to know this. But I’m always running out of shit to say, so I figured this was something to write about. This isn’t out of the blue though. There are two good reasons. One is a problem I feared would happen, despite editor reassurances that it wouldn’t. Two years ago they split fantasy stories off into their own podcast — PodCastle. I like both fantasy and sci-fi and I like getting the best of both. And that’s hard to do with short stories since I’m not in love with them, they have so much harder…
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Line-Edits for Z Company
I am in the middle of a new experience — making line-edits to a story so it’s suitable for publication. I thought this was something only done for books, but apparently short stories need it too… if they’re going into a book. Which makes sense. 95% of these changes are grammar-related. 40% of that 95% are easy — avoid an acronym here, take out a bad word choice there. The others require a lot of thought: weak sentence openers, avoiding past perfect tense, sentence opener variety. And as I make the changes I find myself questioning myself: does this make the story better? Is this what I meant to say?…
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The Final Word on The Shine Journal
I sent my last blog entry to said editor of The Shine Journal. As you could read, it wasn’t an apology, it wasn’t a redaction. It was a re-evaluation. I don’t know what I was expecting for a response, if I was expecting one at all, but I would have liked it to be a bit more magnanimous than it was. Her tone was extremely defensive and proud. Maybe it’s all the Lamebook I’ve been reading, but it feels like adolescent behavior–can’t leave an issue alone, attacks all forms of disparagement, always has to have the last word, uses too many exclamation points The first thing she said was that…
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Aftermath With The Shine Journal
I may have made a mistake. A big one. Maybe. This refers to the last post I made where I compared “The Shine Journal” and “Sorcerous Signals”. First, I want to say why I said what I said. To me, the name of the name game is to get published. To get published you have to get noticed. You get noticed by getting into the big magazines. To get into the big magazines, you get into the small ones first. At least that’s my battle plan. The purpose of this blog is to track my progress and leave an account of what I did or how I did it. However,…
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Critters: A Glimpse of What Editors Go Through
Since I read so many books last quarter, I decided to pick a novel to critique on Critters. These usually take longer to read than a normal novel, but A) you improve your own writing by seeing what others do and B) it’s fun to cut other people down help others. But I thought the experience was interesting because I got a glimpse of what editors see. There were ten novels on the Critters queue at the time I was looking. They were all crappy (as first novels should be) so I needed some criteria on which to judge them. First, which ones were actually smart enough to click the…
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Avatar’s Ending Sucks
It’s been about five days since when I was supposed to be reading Avatar and now, yet, I still haven’t done it yet. I’ve been too busy obsessing over the niggling details that I feel are keeping my story out of publication (damn that editor guy). Mostly the ending. From what I remember about my critiques, about half thought it was too “deus ex machina” and the other half didn’t say anything, so I’m tyring to think of something more significant, something more resonant. But everything I come up with still reeks of some third party coming in and fixing everything. I can’t figure out how to end it that…
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There are some edits that are considered to be… unnatural
One more thing about yesterday’s topic. The editor/not-editor in question said at the end of his e-mail that writing means having to do homework every day for the rest of your life. Now this is a trend I’ve found in some advice-givers, that they try to discourage you for no apparent reason by preventing some bleak view of the task. In this case, he’s trying to discourage me from writing by saying that it involves doing a negative activity… FOR ALL ETERNITY (ominous thunder). Why would he say such a thing if he didn’t want to turn me away from the position? It’s reverse psychology, like army training. “If you…
