Six Sentence Sunday: Missing Gnomes

Hello friends, followers, and fellow Six Sentence Sunday-ers. Thanks for all the great thoughts last week, and once again, I’m moving to a new piece! ‘The Snow Job’ is finished, yay! I’ve started a new manuscript to finish off November, and I may need to do some revision on it soon, because I want to submit sample chapters for it to the CSSF Novel Writer’s workshop in Kansas next year. So I’d love to hear what you all think about the opening scene!

Kinwer tried to look like he was actually about to do morning chores all the way through his father’s north wheat field. Once he was next to the fence he checked back at the farmhouse to see if any of his family was watching, ducked between the rails, waded across the stream, scrambled across the rocky ground and around the hill, and stopped at a mound of earth about as tall as his father. “Hello, Gibbs – I’m here.”

There was no answer. Kinwer circled around the mound, so that he was even less likely to be spotted by anybody from the farms near the village. He wanted to be patient for Gibbs’ sake, but he couldn’t wait here long.

I’ll send some friendly gnomes to visit everybody who leaves feedback! 🙂

Happy Revision day…

So, what did I do for Canada Day? Well, I stayed in the residence hall most of the day and kept plugging away at my revision of “The Storm Mirror.” I’m pretty satisfied with it for a weekend revision, though I realized after I sent it off that I’m probably still not torturing my characters enough. 😦

And today went pretty well – some emergencies popping up at work, but most of them got addressed okay, and my critique of “A Prayer for Healing” got some pretty useful feedback – and lots of complements on my wordcraft too! 🙂

A great note to end the month on.

Plenty of good news here, yay!

First off, my tooth is much better – found some really great dentists here in Lawrence. I’m not quite sure if the insurance stuff is all squared away, but I’m very happy with the rebuild job they did on my chomper. 😀

I sorta met my rebel goal for June – if you count 2000 words of worldbuilding to be the equivalent of a short story. Plus a 972 word flash scene, and a 425 word start that didn’t go anywhere. And I’ve written over 20000 new words total in June.

Started my rewrite of ‘The Storm Mirror’ for fellow workshoppers. I’ll probably be a little crazy trying to finish that tomorrow, but I like where it’s going so far.

And I’m going to sleep now. See you all in July!

Summer of Shorts challenge is having a dark moment.

Words written so far: 33

Mood: Blocked. 😐 And it’s too hot.

I don’t think I’ll be able to get any further on Story number 7 just now. Hopefully I’ll be able to break an idea for a new story to work on this month, and then when I get to Kansas I can figure out if I go back to ‘Marketing the World’ or write it off as a bad go and try to work out one new story idea.

At least I’ve made some decent progress with the critiquing, though I haven’t sailed through several stories like I did yesterday. But every little bit counts.

Speaking of the Kansas workshop, there was some interesting news this afternoon – apparently we’re going to be based on the other side of the KU campus this year, in a snazzy new scholarship dorm, closer to the student union and downtown, so people are excited about that. On the other hand, it’s further from the dining hall where we used to have lunch meetings last year, and it sounds like the union cafeteria isn’t as good for Jim Gunn, so we might be playing the lunch deal by ear.

Oh – and I got some new shoes, which I was wanting to do before I went to Kansas. They’re exactly the same style as the ones I have now, just not as worn out. I kinda liked the thought of that, when I found them in the store again. They’re cheap and comfy, after all, which is what I ask out of shoes.

Missing a Camp Writing day?

First off, Happy belated Father’s Day, all. I had a good day yesterday, spent some time with the family, went up to the cemetery with my brother. For some reason, while we were there, he felt moved to talk to me about some strip clubs that he’d visited – uh, okay, whatever. 😉

Now, it’s almost 10pm, (which is close to my bedtime, believe it or not,) and I haven’t got any writing done on story #7 of my Summer of Shorts challenge, ‘Marketing the world’, or in fact and Camp Nanowrimo writing at all today. Beyond a usually busy day at work, this is mostly because I’m getting into the groove of critiquing for the CSSF workshop – I finished first read throughs on the last 2 stories this morning, and wrote out critique stories for 4 out of 24 stories this afternoon and evening. I’m not sure if I’ll reach my stated goal of finishing all the critiques before I get on the plane Sunday, (plus Camp Nanowrimo, plus packing, etcetera…) but I’m already further along than I was when I landed in Kansas City last year!

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to slice my time well enough to get something written for Camp too, or I might just stall out. But I feel good about getting the ball rolling with the first critiques today.

Do you find it easy to balance between writing and other creative jobs, (critiquing, editing, anything else?) Or is it something where you can only focus on one or the other?

June Goals update

Okay, eleven days into June, and I feel like I’ve got a fair bit to show for it!

• Four stories finished for Camp Nanowrimo/Summer of Shorts, and a fifth one started with a few hundred words.
• Three stories sent in for the CSSF workshop later this month.
• A dozen stories from my fellow workshoppers converted to ebook format so that I can read them through SOON and make notes without needing to have a computer nearby.
• Living room table mostly cleared off so that I can use it for manuscript editing after I get back home in July.
• New ending to ‘Tough Love’ revised and sent in to update the critters.org manuscript queue – it’ll be going out to the critters on Wednesday this week!
• Questions for the Ninja Spotlight FINALLY organized and emails sent out to my four Ninja volunteers so far!
• Eight of my own stories or scripts converted to e-book format for my own review and re-reading pleasure.

That’s all I can think of, but it’s not bad, huh? Have you been able to make a dent on a to-do list this summer?

Six Sentence Sunday – The Shuttle 6

First six. Second six. Third six. Fourth six. Fifth six.

Thanks for all of your comments last week. A mysterious passenger has just confronted Dara in the cockpit about their dangerous predicement…

“Good afternoon, Captain Klein,” he said. “I thought about asking to meet you earlier in the flight, but you looked as if you had enough on your mind. I’m Lieutenant Commander Simon Twain, Star Patrol.”

“Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Commander. But I’m sorry to say that I’ve got more on my mind than ever, so I don’t exactly think that this is the best time for the social niceties…”

“Then I’ll get straight to business,” Twain said, before she could finish the brush-off.

Any comments very gratefully appreciated! I’m actually working on revisions of ‘The Shuttle’ this weekend, to submit it for an in-depth critiquing at the CSSF workshop later this month.

Targets ahead of you may be closer than they appear.

So, I sat down this evening to get started on NaNoEdMo, and began reviewing some of the many critters.org critiques I got on Chapter 1 of ‘The Scroll.’ There were a lot of them, and a lot of mostly-good opinions in each critique, though I had to chuckle about the critter who was so certain that ‘pyjamas’ and ‘omelette’ were typos. Perhaps in the US they are, but I won’t apologize for using Canadian variants!

Anyway, after about half an hour of this, I realized that I could easily get drawn into trying to tweak the chapter so that it would please as many readers as possible, but that wasn’t what I really needed to do at this point. I want to have a sample chapter that will look promising enough to Kij Johnson that she’ll accept me for the workshop, but it doesn’t really need to be spotless for that, and spending a lot of time polishing beforehand might be counter-productive, in that if I go to Kansas convinced that my sample chapters are perfect, it’ll be harder for me to really listen to what other people tell me about them when I’m there. The responses I got from critters.org were very positive, overall, and that’s an important point.

And after that, I realized something else. I’d put a bunch of qualifiers in front of ‘what I needed to do before I was ready to apply for the Kansas workshop’, but most of it really isn’t necessary. I was getting confused between what I needed to send to Kij to apply for the workshop, and what I need to have ready in mid-May, assuming that I’m accepted, to send to all the other writers who’ll be coming to the workshop. So, I’m only a few days away from having my application all ready to go – one sample chapter and 5-10 pages of synopsis, and the synopsis is mostly ready. I just need to tweak it to make sure that somebody else can follow it, and not get confused about who one of the characters is, or something else like that I can smooth out with more description.

So, I’m in the interesting and fun position of not having to push to reach a goal because it’s not as distant a point on the horizon I thought. Cool!