Since I started writing and submitting short stories, my focus has been heavily on the SFWA qualifying markets. To make sure I didn’t mess up and send two stories to one magazine or the same story to two different magazines at any given time, I set up a document that kept track of 1) What were the qualifying magazines, 2) Which of my stories, if any, fit in each one and 3) Which stories were out with which magazine now.

As I wrote more stories, it became clear that the list was getting long and hard to manage, so I started creating separate documents, naming them “round 1″, “round 2″, ect, keeping track of four stories in each.

Today, I sent off the last story from “round 1.” These stories are the ones I first started to submit with almost two years ago (and most of them were at least a couple years old at that point). Of the four stories, one showed success, winning an Honorable Mention in Writers of the Future, and for my first try, that counts for something, I think.

I’ve noticed a lot of growth in my work over the past couple years, looking at the differences between these first pieces and my current ones. I’m looking forward to more.

It’s been difficult coming back after such a demanding and foreign routine. Before Clarion West, I was used to squeezing writing and reading into small cracks in my day. Suddenly, not only being permitted, but expected to spend huge amounts of time on both, was disorienting. Now, being back for a couple weeks, I’m experiencing the opposite. I don’t have 20,000 words to critique by tomorrow at 9am, but I do have a normal day job I need to get to. And writing needs to find its little place in my schedule again. I do believe, though, that while Clarion West was a wonderful experience, it’s something that has to be built on. A professional writing career is not made better by locking yourself in a room and doing nothing but writing. Strong writers need to have a wealth of life experiences.

A couple other things I learned on my trip:
1. The Writing Business is really, truly, we’re-not-saying-this-just-to-make-you-feel-better, a subjective business.
2. Fellow writers are a valuable resource, and one not to be wasted.
3. Writer’s block lasts as long as I want it to.

One of my biggest fears when I went to Clarion West was that I would only be able to write maybe four stories. I wrote seven, including a small flash fiction piece. I still think there really, truly, are bad times to write (running on three hours of sleep is one of them). I still think that one week is an insanely short period of time to finish a story in. But I also think that a serious author always has something she can be working on, even she doesn’t know what it is yet.

Thanks, everyone, for being so supportive while I was away. I’m working on setting up a Clarion West ‘09 links page. I’m also really looking forward to a new school year starting. I’m sure it will bring lots of great memories, and hopefully some great stories too.

-Katrina

P.S. If you plan to make a career out of writing speculative fiction, I would definitely consider applying to Clarion West, even if you’re not sure you’re writing is “good enough” yet. The workshop is about improving as a writer, not for proving how wonderful a writer you already are.

I’m nervous, but excited. (Really, at this moment, I’m singing a song called, “Nervous, But Excited.”)* The lovely packet of info we’ve gotten suggested that I cut myself from all other human contact for the duration of the workshop. Okay, it doesn’t say that verbatim, but I do know that I spend a large amount of time on the Internet, a block of time that I won’t have at my disposal while I’m there. So from June 19th through August 10th I will not be available via e-mail, nor will I be able to respond to comments on my blog/Facebook/Twitter/ect. (Yes, I’m aware that the workshop ends on July 31st. I need my travel and recouping days.)

While I won’t be making longer blog posts over the summer, I will keep up with my microblog posts and well as my status. (It’s a good ten-second break when I’m stuck.) I hope you’ll all continue to put up with me during that time. Pray for my sanity when you get the chance.

See you all again in August!

*The author of the post apologizes for the bad SNL reference and blames it purely on her lack of sleep at the time of this writing.

So far this is the only thing that’s helped me: I create a new document and just start writing down all the words that I know aren’t what I’m looking for, but I’m thinking of anyway. Most of the time, when I see them all listed in front of me, the right word finally hits. This is a list I came up with recently when I wanted to describe someone having trouble breathing. I knew I wanted it to fit into the phrase “her ______ breaths.”

This is the list that I generated:
effort
heaving
struggling
heating
fought for
labored

Clearly, “heating” had nothing to do with anything, I probably only thought of it because it sounded like “heaving,” but I wrote it down anyway. Finally got to the word “labored” after six tries.

Feel free to share your strategies for getting that right word in the comment section. I’d love to hear them!

The “13 things” range from cold fusion to an over-sized virus, and each topic receives its own chapter for discussion. For me, most everything was new material that I had no previous knowledge of. My first fear was that the author might try to push his opinion on some of these puzzling mysteries as absolute fact. That didn’t happen. In each case, the arguments for and against the subject at hand were discussed fairly and the interpretation was ultimately left to the reader. If there was any underlying message in the book, it was that science is always discovering new things, and it will continue to discover new things no matter how much we think we have the universe all figured out.

I call this a gem for writer’s block, because there are many uncharted areas in the book that could be built up in various science fiction worlds (and, in fact, many of them already have). That is not to say that people who don’t write wouldn’t enjoy the book as well, that was simply the light that I read it in.

#1 A List of Terrible Things
I’ve decided that spending most of the query telling the reader about all the horrible things that happen to a character doesn’t work. You need something to make your character likeable first. I can’t say what the “likeable” thing is, maybe just a quirky way of introducing them that makes me think they’re quirky too. But so far I’ve read about dying family members, cities destroyed, evil organizations, and until I care who’s facing all of these things, I might as well move onto the next one.

#2 Vampires
What is it with vampires? Seriously, more than 10% of these queries are vampire stories. And the thing is that a couple sound good, but I can’t imagine what it’s like to compete for attention when you’re dealing with the same premise as a tenth of the stuff in the pile. To all the vampire writers out there, I wish you the best of luck.

#3 Life Stories
I don’t mean people writing memoirs, I mean people telling about their personal lives within the query letter. Personal life histories all sounds very similar and generally involve one or all of the following facts:

1) Author loves to write and started somewhere between four and six.
2) Author has special spot in home town that gave inspiration to book.
3) Author has friends or family members who love book.
4) Author has completed, but not published, between two and four other novels.

For me, all four are true to at least to some degree. If you are writing a story in which the specific location is highly significant, then I can see including #2 in a query. If #3 happens to be a well-respected writing professional, then that might be good. But otherwise, I’m not sure how any of these factoids help, since they are true for so many people, and the object of a query is to stand out.

The verdict:
My favorite query had a nice, quirky, voice to it. It sounded exactly like the main character was the one explaining the story. That with a brief paragraph explaining some past writing experience, even though it was non-fiction experience, made me think, “I bet this is a well-written book.” The others I pulled as well-done queries, had a lot of the same qualities. In the end, they made me trust the author to be able to write the proposed story well.

As new authors, we frequently doubt our work. Or, even worse, we feel like it’s all about knowing someone and that the quality of the work doesn’t matter. Agents and editors, I know it’s an extra bit of time out of your day, but please keep sending those personal notes to us new authors whenever you can. Also, please ignore those annoying people who try to write back and complain that their work was rejected.* Most of us know that our work could always use improvement, and we especially value feedback from those who work in the industry and know what it’s about.

*If you have ever done this, please don’t do it again. Ever. I’ve read way too many agents’ websites that say they don’t provide specific feedback partially because they’ve gotten angry reply letters in the past. Please, go beat a pillow with a stick or something instead.  Then, when you’re calmed down, go back and look at the manuscript again, because the odds are that whatever the feedback was, it was probably correct.

In college, my creative writing teacher always upheld the gag order. When your story was being critiqued in the workshop, you said nothing. You made no hand motions, no exaggerated facial expressions. You sat and listened to people talk about your story as if you weren’t even there. That was probably the best lesson in getting feedback I could ask for.

It’s not easy to keep a straight face when your story is being blatantly misunderstood. In one of my stories, my main character was a little girl who’d been turned into a living doll. She could move, but not speak. Somehow, one of the readers missed this and said in their review, “I’m not sure what Mika is. Is she a monkey or something?”

I was shocked. There was no way this person could’ve read my story thoroughly and mistook Mika for a monkey. Here’s the nice thing about critique groups, though. There’s more than one person. If the next person who spoke said, “I don’t think it was a monkey, I think it was a doll,” then I could be fairly confident that I conveyed my character’s species correctly. If, however, the next person said, “Yeah, I thought it was a monkey too. Or maybe a lemur,” then I’d know something went wrong.

As authors, we’re proud of our work and like to think that our ideas are clear and our plots understandable. But by the same token, we’ve got to be open to the concept that we’re wrong. That’s the most difficult part of receiving critiques.

Incidentally, later on in the workshop, I critiqued another story that didn’t make any sense to me. It turned out that the whole story was a parallel to historic events, (history being my weakest subject, in my defence). Once I picked up on the hints that I missed, I didn’t tell the author to change a thing. If I was reading the story in a magazine, I might’ve just passed it off, but many others would’ve enjoyed it, and trying to be more obvious would’ve completely ruined it.

At the end of the day, if a story is in print, or on a publisher’s desk, the author cannot be there to explain herself (or himself). So the best we can do is have a sharp eye for what feedback is helpful and what goes into the mental “Ignore me” bin.

But for the time being, I will try to keep my usual posts on schedule and hopefully I will have a new look for the blog in the upcoming months.

The goal of National Novel Writing Month is to generate a new 50,000 word novel over the course of November. (Likewise, the goal of Script Frenzy is to write a 100 page script over the month of April.) Now, in my mind, anyone who’s considering writing as a serious career choice should be able to do this with little or no trouble. For many, after the first couple years, it’s simply not a challenge anymore.

So they do more. Go on the NaNoWriMo forums, and you’ll see plenty of people with far more lofty goals – “I will write 100K, I will write 200K,” the list goes on. But here’s the trade off. When your only goal is to write as many words as possible, the quality of the work goes down. You pad your sentences by saying things like, “It was almost as if the man she was looking at right now was thinking about taking her very life away from her”  instead of, “he looked ready to kill her.” And when NaNoWriMo is over, this is a nasty habit to break.

I’m trying Script Frenzy for the first time this year, and November will be my sixth NaNoWriMo. My goal is to write at least 100 pages in April and at least 50,000 words in November. I’m at a point in my writing now where this does not seem like an overwhelming challenge. If it feels that way to you, cut the word goal down until it’s something you’re comfortable with. I will write at least that much, more if the story goes there. So in the end I have 100 pages that I am proud of rather than 400 pages of babbling. (If you can write 200K of quality prose in thirty days, more power to you. Adjust these numbers in your head for whatever level you’re at.)

I don’t know if anyone else read, “Sideways Stories from Wayside School” when they were younger. There’s a story in one of the books about a little girl who can draw incredibly fast. Every art period, she tries to beat her old record for number of drawings. The teacher sits down and talks with her: “A person could spend their whole life drawing one picture of a cat. I’m sure in that time you could draw a million cats.” (Two million, the girl corrects.) “But if that one picture of a cat is better than any of your two million, then that person has produced more art than you.”