The lack of productivity is strong with this one

I was doing so well while working on my last story, but then I finished it and promptly went back to being useless in the writerly productivity department. On the plus side, out of all the ideas and story fragments on my computer screaming "Ooo, me! Pick me!", I had a very nice conversation with one Friday night, and I think we made a connection. I had to reschedule our first date a few times due to those pesky real life issues getting in the way, but tonight we're going to sit down and chat over some iced lattes. I'll hold the door and pay for the drinks; the story will provide stimulating conversation, and if I'm lucky, perhaps some inspiration for a dramatic tale of lust and bloodshed.

Speaking of tales of lust and bloodshed, according to my writerly friend Vash, my revision of the orgy story has officially achieved "the exact right ratio of vomiting to sex." It is a proud day.

On another writing note, I wrote a 300-word flash story a while back which involved an anthropomorphized English language getting all battered and abused by a whiny internet user. I sent it a few places, and while one market liked the writing and imagery, they thought the story wouldn't speak to the casual reader the same way it would to the writing community. Point well taken, so I thought perhaps the ideal market would be one where writers are the target audience. With that in mind, I shipped the story off to The VERB, an e-zine for writers (for the life of me, I can't remember where I stumbled across it), and yesterday got an e-mail that they'd like to buy it for their October 2008 issue. So yay for my little writerly flash story.

What the story wants, the story gets

And the tense-hopper is done, a whole two weeks before the next TNEO deadline. That feels good. I have to admit to tearing up a little while writing the ending, and then again today while editing the ending. If I can make someone else cry with this story, I will consider my mission complete--that is, of course, as long as they are shedding "oh, that was so sad and touching" tears and not "I weep in joy because this crap is finally over" tears.

Even though it took switching everything to present tense to put an end to the brain-hurting tense hopping, I really thought I was going to end up changing this story back to past tense once I got through the first draft. But that little bugger got really stubborn when I tried to switch it back, and I know better than to argue with a story when it sets its mind on something. So present tense it is.

And on that note, it's time to troll my files for another story to work on. Hmm, here's one I started in present tense . . .

Once again, I flash my assets

As some folks already know from me babbling elsewhere, I queried Hub on a submission earlier this week and received a reply that they'd like to publish "To Someone Who Needs Prayer." Yay-ness! Currently awaiting the contract and what issue it will be in, but I will be sure to shamelessly plug when the time comes.

I think the story was up to about 1,600 words when I had it critiqued at Odyssey. A few folks suggested the story would work better as a flash piece, and I had to agree. So after making some story-level revisions, I focused on getting it down to 1,000 words, which turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. But after many head-meets-desk moments, I did it. Well, if you want to be really picky about things, it ended up being about 20-something words over 1,000. Close enough for grenades and rounded-to-the-nearest-hundred submission word counts.

In the writerly progress department, things have been going well. There have been distractions aplenty this week (like taking on layout duty for a newsletter I normally only have to do the content editing on), and this weekend will be full of musical craziness (dress rehearsal tonight, concert tomorrow night, and yet more solo and choir singing on Sunday morning), but when I have sat down to write, the productivity has been a-flowing. I'm hoping I can finish and polish up the first draft of the short story I've been working on--the one with the unintentional and previously blogged about tense hopping, which is tentatively borrowing its title from an Emily Dickinson poem, "Nobody knows this little Rose."

I've already slacked on dedicating Tuesday nights to the novel revision, though. A few weeks ago, I spent my Tuesday night writing time revising the orgy story. The Tuesday after that, I skipped out on the journey into Philly and fiddled with the tense-hopping story, but mostly slacked since the Sinus Headache from Hell kept coming and going all night. And this past Tuesday, I was in such a groove on the tense-hopper that I just kept going.

So on the bad side, my dedication to novel revisions is rubbish. On the good side, at least I'm slacking in favor of short story writing instead of DVDs and Mythbusters.

Multiple Tense Disorder

Yesterday was a new one for me in the writing department. I started work on a new story and was happily writing away in past tense when all the sudden, about a few hundred words into the piece, I realized I had switched to present tense. I figured, "what the heck, it's a crappy first draft that can be fixed later" and kept going. Next thing I knew, I had switched from present to past and back again over the course of only a few sentences. That's when it started to hurt my brain. So despite my desire to just plow through the rough draft, I went back, read over what I had written, and decided the story really wanted to be in present tense. And once I changed all the past stuff to present, the writing proceeded without anymore tense hiccups.

I've changed a story's tense after finishing a draft and evaluating the story as a whole, but this is the first time I've found myself switching midstream while writing. Weird.

Productivity...check

So much for going to bed early tonight like I had planned. Oops.

Anyway, I finally got my writing groove back on this past week and finished my story revisions in plenty of time for the first TNEO deadline. I feel better now. I first wrote the story in question at Odyssey last summer, and I have since come to lovingly refer to it as "the orgy story." Its actual title, however, is "The Sun's Rebirth" (changed from the boring and generic "Legacy" title I originally gave it). I was amazed by just how much stuff in that draft didn't need to be there. It started out at 6,100 words; now it's about 3,800.

Now I need to figure out what to work on next. Something new, or another revision? Or the revision that will essentially be something new because I'm going to rewrite it from a completely different POV? Will have to look through what's waiting in the wings and see which one goes "Ooo, me! Pick me!" the loudest.