The Creative Profession

It's time to do a quick update on the writing thing. In short, it's going okay. I have a publication record of six rejections to one publication (not too bad) and a few publications under my belt. There is one novel finished and sent, and this week John and I completed the thumbnails for the first issue of the comic. We've settled on 32 pages in black and white, with a couple of bits of red. We're both seem to be improving and we've found a good pace.

First title: Black's Magic - The Things We Do For Love

I have also entered a few competitions. My submission at Escape Pod isn't doing nearly so well as Anarkey's, but going over there and seeing what was doing well was enlightening. No word back from any of the others yet.

There should also be a confession here, and that is I haven't turned around the few rejections that I've had, and I haven't managed to complete either Hawk House or The Exit Generation yet. They both have great potential, but they seem like monstrous tasks just now, and all my excitement is with the new novel - Jamie's Secret. YA and quite angst-filled, but it deals with a lot of subjects I want to address and I'm enjoying writing it. I'm having a small problem getting a positive chapter in early though, as there is a lot of setting up of things to come. Almost all my characters are starting from difficult or unpleasant situations in one way or another, and I need something happy to make the arc readable. I suspect this will have to be done by putting in another character.

I've also been trying to do more editing-based stuff. It's much easier to find the flaws in my own stuff if I'm used to spotting it in other people's work. To that end, I read The Ad Hoc Leader's Rich Guy novel, did a farce plot and helped out with some smaller editing tasks. I've discovered that a lot of people seem to have the same problem plotting; it's tough to get the slope to the climax right. Beginnings are easy, middles can be written through climaxes are easy, but the chunk before the climax is tough, and knowing when to stop the wind down at the end is hard too. This seems to result in there being too much middle, then a climax which isn't well lead up to and a drop-off which is either too detailed or leaves the reader going 'But what happened to...!'. I've seen this problem in both of the short stories I haven't fixed, and in a couple of stories I have out. It is something I need to work on.

On the bright side, I got a really nice acceptance letter which came with an invitation to read the piece in North Carolina. Fortunately the editor was happy to do that for me. Mum also sent me an e-mail from Nigel, who wrote the last post I made. We're going to talk about re-writing for a more specific market.

Now I just need to stop being distracted by pretty new projects and get on with the shiny ones I already have.