A quick update…

First off, I reached my 50 hours target for revision in March, with – well, let’s say, with a little time to spare. 🙂

In April, you’ll hear a lot from me, between A-Z challenge posts and Weekend Writing Warriors, but you probably won’t hear much about my Camp Nanowrimo process in between that. Never fear, though, I’ll be plugging away at “The Gnomes are Missing” and hopefully having a blast.

Oh, I’m also going to be doing the open mike night in James Street North Wednesday evening, reading two flash stories, “I heard Dad’s voice” and “Welcome to Your Revolution.”

So yeah, that’s what’s up with me. (Or part of it.) Probably won’t be juggling What’s up Wednesday until April is over.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Rose-Spar Ladies 2

Welcome friends, followers, and Weekend Writing Warriors!

This week, I’m sharing eight more sentences from my funny fantasy adventure, “The Rose-Spar Ladies.”

Snippet 1

Cromeve and his friends had saved villages from giant insects, done battle with an evil sorcerer, and chased off highwaymen. But mostly, they’d crawled through some of the most miserable underground tunnels you could imagine looking for forgotten gold.

The two Rose-spar Ladies were the best treasure Cromeve had found in his years of adventure. Each one was no taller than his hand from wrist to fingertip, and their resemblance to noblewomen in elegant gowns was better if you squinted at them. There wasn’t much to each lady’s face than a button nose and the impression of sunken eyes.

But they’d somehow been fashioned from incredibly delicate pink stone. Cromeve rather thought the ladies had been made by wizardry, for no other reason than he couldn’t imagine anyone managing to carve them with ordinary tools. One mistake, one fault in the rose-spar, one chisel blow a fraction too hard… and the craftsman with would have only had a collection of shards like the one in his bindle.

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/

What’s Up Wednesday? It doesn’t look like spring yet

What’s Up Wednesday is a weekly blogfest to share the answers to a few simple questions… Join us!

What I’m reading:

Mostly short stories, from PodCastle, Shimmer, and Andromeda Spaceways. Still listening to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Culture: Excession’ on Audible. I found myself without my Kindle and tablet yesterday, still wanted to get some reading done. I stopped at a bookstore and considered picking up “Witches Abroad,” “Small Gods,” or “Magic Burns,” but ended up going home and reading a chapter and a half from “Knot Gneiss.”

What I’m writing:

NaNoEdMo hour counter is at 39 hours, 48 minutes, and I haven’t done any editing for today! The big changes to Orpheus/Underworld are underway, and I’ve broken ground on “The Time Bubble Blues.” Haven’t gotten much done on HTRYN and “The Angel’s Charlie” since last week.

What inspires me right now:

The Veronica Mars movie, whoohoo! Shiny new Chromebooks for Camp Nanowrimo. The lecture notes I brought back from Odyssey and the prospect of this year’s summer workshops coming.

What else I’ve been up to:

Getting locked out of my office, which is why I don’t have the Kindle or lots of my other gear which is locked inside. 😉 Checking out my assigned cabin and trying to get a little family reunion together.

What about you? Click here to join the hop or check in with some other great writers.

A disappointment and some new plans

Just heard back from Kij Johnson about her CSSF workshop – once again, I didn’t make it in. I’m disappointed, but not too badly. There’s lots of other stuff going on in my writing life, and ‘Kitchen Scale’ is no longer looking so shiny somehow.

I’ve sent a new sample story over to Chris McKitterick, to throw my hat into the ring for his CSSF workshop; that’s the two week short story critiquing program I attended in the summer of 2011 and 2012. I’ve been working on my enrollment form for TNEO 2014, where I think I’ll go in the novel group and workshop “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children.”

I’ve also committed to finishing “The Gnomes are Missing” for Camp Nano in April! This was the novel project that I pitched to Kij for the workshop last summer, and I’m really excited about getting back to it.

Let’s see, what else? I got a cool idea while walking to the bus stop this afternoon; guidance counselors. Like really freaky good ones who listen to anything you can come up with about what sort of life you want and come up with the perfect plan for what you should do to get that kind of life. Not a perfect plan perhaps, but much better than anything you could do for yourself.

Except no plan can ever prepare you for the choices you’ll have to make, or for the way life changes your priorities. And the guidance counselors are free until you’re 18 or 19–after that, it gets more expensive. (And not necessarily in terms of money.) 🙂 It’s just a novum so far, not sure what the characters or the plot will be, but I think it could be a really fun one.

Weekend Writing Warriors – The Rose-Spar Ladies 1

Welcome friends, followers, and Weekend Writing Warriors!

I’m switching to a new story for this week, a funny fantasy adventure, “The Rose-Spar Ladies.”

 

It would never have happened if Cromeve hadn’t tried to clean the house.

As he tried to mimic what Aledell did with the dusting rag, a corner of it caught one of the knickknacks on the hearthstone, which bumped into another, which sent the Rose-spar Lady tumbling to the hard floor.

Cromeve gathered the pieces of rose-spar into a pile on top of the dusting rag and tied it up into a bindle, and muttered to himself, “her own fault for leaving the lady out in such a precarious spot.”

Cromeve hadn’t always been a husband and farmer. To tell the truth, he wasn’t much of a farmer even now. He managed to gather some corn and vegetables each year, and raise a few animals, but it weren’t really enough to support the family. But a little hunting in the wild forest with the bow and arrow put more meat in the pot, and he did odd jobs for the other farmers along the path, clearing heavy obstacles, digging holes, and helping out with building just about anything.

Once, though, he’d been Cromeve the Sturdy, valiant warrior and the most beloved adventure-seeker in the Fearless Five.

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/

EdMo hours update and and a look at the schedule

Hours spent editing in March so far: 34 and 49 minutes

I don’t think I’ve actually talked about my NaNoEdMo schedule here before. I’ve built a special Excel spreadsheet to set my day-to-day editing targets, because it isn’t as simple as 1 hour, 37 minutes every day. I have more time available for editing on the weekends than weekdays for instance.

So, I set up a schedule with three types of days: weekends, weekdays, and Comicon. I knew I’d be crazy busy for Comicon, so that Sunday I only gave myself a target of an hour. Actually, I think I did a little less, but I’d done extra time the day before.

The weird thing about the schedule, though, is that there isn’t a single target per type of day otherwise. I’ve set up two formulas. For one, I’m only committing to doing 2 hours per weekend day, and I set the time for a weekday to make up the balance of getting to 50 hours in the month, which comes as a little less than an hour and a half on a weekday. For the other schedule, I only commit to an hour on a weekday, and set the weekends to make up the balance, which is over 3 hours every weekend day.

And generally, I don’t worry too much if I’m caught up on at least one of these schedules. They pass each other every week or so, so it doesn’t matter that much. If I’m actually ahead on both schedules, then I know I’m doing pretty well, and if I’m between, then there’s the second ‘stretch’ target a little ahead of me, encouraging me to keep going.

 

So, I guess that’s about it. 15 hours, eleven minutes to get done over the next nine days!

My first brush with Rejectomancy

I’ve heard a lot about rejectomancy, the practice of puzzling over a rejection letter and trying to figure out what it means. I even critiqued a very fun story where the term was taken literally and the MC could always tell what was on somebody’s mind from any sort of rejection, be it verbal, electronic, or printed. But I guess I’ve never really gotten into the act until today, where I sorta tripped over it backwards.

I’m not going to share the market with you all, but it’s a pro market that takes science fiction and fantasy. I submitted ‘Tough Love’ to them a week ago, and got an email back this morning saying no thanks, it didn’t push enough boundaries for them, and actually suggesting that I read what they publish to get a better feel for it. (D’oh!) I did read a few stories from this market before I submitted, but I guess I didn’t pick up on how much they liked really weird stuff, or I put it out of my mind because I thought ‘well, I can’t tell how weird my own stories are.’ Maybe that’s true to a certain extent, but now that I’m really thinking about it, I have to admit that Tough Love is not particularly weird.

One of my Odyssey friends suggested that I should write something weirder next time, but I’m not sure if I can be weird on command. My natural inclination is just to not bother submitting to this market again until one of two things happens: either somebody else suggests them to me as a market for a particular story, or I spontaneously think, “Oh wow, this story is so weird I have to submit it to [Market]!”

🙂

What’s Up Wednesday? The Last Day of Winter…

What’s Up Wednesday is a weekly blogfest to share the answers to a few simple questions… Join us!

What I’m reading:

Still listening to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood on Audible, and Escape Artist podcasts, and started listening to ‘Culture: Excession’ again, though I feel like it’s a little hard to follow on audio, sigh. Finished the Secret Circle trilogy, and I’m branching out to some new markets of short stories, reading from ‘Shimmer’ and ‘Andromeda Spaceways In-flight Magazine’, as well as catching up on Strange Horizons.

What I’m writing:

NaNoEdMo clock count: 28 and a half hours! I’ve finished my revisions on ‘Gotta Have that Look’, and started making some big changes to my Orpheus story. I haven’t given up on HTRYN and “The Angel’s Charlie,” but going through the world triage seems to be dragging on a little, sigh.

What inspires me right now:

Write-ins, the Odyssey video chat salon, and getting back to using my Alphasmart Dana on the bus.

What else I’ve been up to:

Not that much lately. Waiting for more news from Kij Johnson about whether I get into the Novel workshop at CSSF, and organizing my huge Audible collection. 🙂

What about you? Click here to join the hop or check in with some other great writers.

Call this my thousandth post…

After all, what’s a post or two between friends? 😉 In fact, I’m not quite sure exactly how many posts I’ve put up here at the Kelworth Files, but it’s definitely in the quadruple digits now. So, in another little retrospective, I’ve come up with a semi-random list of ten posts for your regularly scheduled walk down memory lane.

1. Feedback Swap Update
2. Nanowrimo Day 23 – jumping from story to story.
3. Crossover Banner: The Wizards of Roswell
4. Blog the Cat: Chapter Eight and wrap-up
5. NanoEdmo Update Week 3 (2011)
6. C is for Critters (A-Z challenge 2011)
7. J is for Just a Dream (A-Z challenge 2012, Script Frenzy)
8. Nanowrimo Spotlight 2012: Rhianna. Also, check out my guest post in Rhianna’s Bag of Holding!
9. A Day to Rest. (Sabbath thoughts.)
10. Nanowrimo Spotlight 2013: A Fairytale Heart Races Through November

So, thanks for hanging in with me. Stay tuned for the next thousand posts!

Weekend Writing Warriors – Orpheus and the Camera Man 5

Welcome friends, followers, and Weekend Writing Warriors!

I’m still sharing snippets from my my modern fantasy short, Orpheus and the Cameraman. Tony has asked Marshall to be his guide into the underworld to fetch back Tony’s dead girlfriend, and Marshall has his own reason for wanting to go…

Snippet 1 Snippet 2 Snippet 3 Snippet 4

One week after they got back to campus, Tony knocked on Marshall’s door, bringing research.

“This is everything we’ll need,” he said. “Most of it is from a Greek monk I found in Caledonia, but I’ve checked it out as much as I could with second opinions. I trust him, I believe he’s done his part, and he’ll come through for us if you do.”

“And he said that I’m somebody who can lead the way into Hades’ underworld?”

“Yeah. I gave him a token of you.”  Tony tossed a black lens cap into the air, and Marshall caught it, growling.  “You ready with your psi-camera stuff?”

Visit the other Weekend Writing Warriors at http://www.wewriwa.com/