Submitted: New York Story

Sent New York Story to Electric Velocipede.

I hope the story gets picked up – best writing experience I’ve had to date.

Roadmap for 08

Over the last few weeks and months, and in light of my recent spate of consistent production I have began to muse about my writing plans for the future.

This is quite new to me – previously there has been a distinct lack of plan or structure when writing. Now I’m more comfortable with my new methodology i.e not starting writing until the story is plotted I feel I can apply this format to plans beyond the current piece of writing into an overall game-plan.

So, what’s in the immediate pipeline?

Bullet With Butterfly Wings.

This is complete as of yesterday, so I need to focus on production and website stuff.

Warp Factory.

This, I estimate, is six weeks away, maybe less. Then comes the editing. And then more typos. Bastards.

Begin Stand-Off.

Or City of Lost Light; I’m torn on the title. I like Stand-Off purely down to the fact it’s the first name that occured to me when I started. City of Lost Light sounds overly familiar – I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere. Titles normally occur to me before I start writing; when they don’t I have trouble thinking of one. This mocks my writing sensibilities.
This is the one I’m looking forward to. The story is plotted and written down- bar the (quite nutty) ending. I think there’s 2-3 months work here.

Beyond

Short stories.

Throughout 2008 my plan is that I produce 2 or 3 (hopefully more) short stories – and by short I mean 2-3k words. I love the longer ones, don’t get me wrong but I need to start writing saleable product. A few stories pumped out and put straight out to pasture will help get the blood flowing, er, ink-wise.

Novella – K&M
K&M is my stab at a Robert Rankin/Terry Pratchett comedy, replete with uniquely-named police officers, ex-war criminals, a possessed village, an Egyptian god or two and the equally weird inhabitants of the Suffolk village Bentley-Barnes. This is a good sized story – I’m thinking 20 or 30k in size. The plot exists somewhere – I just need to remember to dig it out. The story actually came from a screenplay I wrote for the laugh about 8 or so years ago. The idea has stuck with me ever since…I hope to do it justice.

An actual full length novel

Beyond that I’m going to start a novel. I don’t have an idea yet, and the novels I’ve attempted to write in the past have failed due to bad planning and misunderstanding the process (i.e I’m not Stephen King and can’t just write from beginning to end without plotting first) of a novel. Plus my ideas weren’t that hot. Hopefully, with a full year of consistent writing behind me I can hit a rich vein of creativity.

In the meantime I will continue to refine and re-submit existing work where applicable. The market is slow, tough, and themed (i.e. unless you have a story about mechanical dinosaurs for our next issue we’re not interested) so the only solution is a persistant, discipline approach to finding and selling my work.

PS, what is with the god-damned formatting on this web-site? WordPress is horrible when it comes to editing. Completely unforgivable.

Bullet With Butterfly Wings – Officially finished

Yup.

It’s done.

All 21,830 words, spanning 13 years and three or four generations of writing style, all merged together into the glorious mess that is Chapter 5 of the FreezeBurn Chronicles.

Details on upload to my website to follow…

Undo – Rejected

Getting to the point where I’m sick of posting these but yes, other rejection.

What really bugs me to shit is submitting a story, waiting five months to only get a ’sorry’ single line reply. Magazines who do that immediately go on my shit list: I won’t waste time with them again.

Half-Way (?) through Warp Factory

Getting there. Slow, but so fulfilling. Every story I write is like learning *how* to write all over again. I love it. Word count is an estimated 10,000 words. Yes, another long one.

I’m taking my time and really letting myself get involved with themes, metaphors and character interaction, all because the synopsis is written and I know exactly where I am going. Why didn’t I follow this method ten years ago is a question which will bug me to shit from now on.

I love the undercurrents between Frank and Analiese, all these rivers of emotions, how Analiese is Frank’s tentative link to reality and Analiese is trying to understand this version of a person she has known over and over again.

Yes, above final line is very cryptic but I’ve gotten past the point of posting plot notes, or even snippets of the story. There are many twists and turns, certainly more than I anticipated when I started re-writing Warp Factory (and a hundred times more than when I first decided to write a story on what I thought was a cool-as-fuck title) and I want the sense of mystery to remain that way.

Great

Filemaker 8.5 does not work with OS X Leopard.

Considering Apple own Filemaker this is hopeless bordering on ridiculous. While I’m tempted to blame Apple I think it really needs to land squarely at the feet of Filemaker.

Consequently – hence the rant – my publication tracking database won’t open so I can’t update my submissions. I’ve had a few recently (rejections, natch) which I need to update the database with, and I also have one story (The Grand Station) that is out there submitted in magazine land, but I’ve no idea which publisher.

Warp Factory: update

I managed around 2,500 words this weekend. So far it’s going well, although I’ve become obsessed with passive writing and word repetition.

This is not healthy.

Warp Factory – synopsis complete

Well after four feverish hours this morning I have officially completed the synopsis on Warp Factory. Eventually I had to shut myself in the living room with my notepad, turn off the television and stared out the window until I finally sorted it all.

The plot is really convoluted. Or to put it another way I convoluted it by having to work out the plot after not having had one for the first half. Sure, I had an inkling of an idea of where I wanted it to all wind up but as usual I failed to work out all the logic that involved Frank getting to that point.

Once I sat down and scratched my head I realised it wouldn’t hold up. Hence the hours put in with my Lamy fountain pen and an A4 notebook. I built the synopsis from scratch, re-imaging some characters, adding flesh to others (the wall street salesmen for instance) and forced both Frank (the protagonist) and the story over some major hurdles in order to get from A to Z in a semblance of order that would primarily make sense to me, and then to the reader.

My synopses (synopsi?) are weird – I move from writing blocks of narrative to single lines of instructions. I also tend to write most of the dialogue during this stage. What this results in is a mish-mash of narrative versus garbled instructions, so in effect they’re half written. The onus is then when I type it up into Scrivener I don’t have to worry about the plot and can instead focus my creativity on my writing. It’s an interesting premiss; bear in mind I normally just sit down and write the damn thing.

This whole plot structure lark is

a) new to me and

b) requires a different set of skills, such as logic, memory etc.

It’s been great fun;-) Estimated word count is about 9,000. Interested to see how close I get to that. What’s next? Well, ‘writing’ the story – as per above – and getting it all mapped out on Scrivener as I write. Looking forward to that bit.