An Eagle Can’t Sit Waiting on the Wind

Well, I’ve been trying to get myself up into submissions gear again, after more than a year since I’ve submitted my work to a market (as opposed to applying for workshops, getting critiques, etcetera.) I set a goal of making a submission in August, which I might not make, just because I don’t want to send anything out that I know I can make better with a little more time.

I find a lot of good personal inspiration in certain country/pop songs, and when I came upon one particular number yesterday, I realized that it could serve as my anthem for submitting fiction. The song is a duet by Mel Tillis and Pam Tillis (who are father and daughter,) and it speaks to me about chasing your dreams instead of sitting around hoping that they’ll find you:

Of course, the big problem is telling the difference between “Waiting on the wind”, and the times that you really need to take a rest because your wings are way too tired. An eagle can’t fly all the time either, and taking off in a dead calm isn’t as easy as it looks.

IWSG: Facing rejection and accepting ‘as good as I can make it now’

Okay, it’s time for the August 2013 edition of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. Apologies for not participating in July, but I was pretty ragged with Odyssey writing that week, and my blogging was down to the minimum.

It’s nearly two years now since I last submitted anything to a publishing market. At the time, I told myself that I needed to concentrate on the craft, but really, that was probably just my insecurity, finding a way to avoid rejection. Well, I’ve definitely learned a lot about the craft of writing, and I while I was at Odyssey a lot of people told me that I should be submitting a lot, that I was ready for it. Jeanne told me, Sheila Williams told me, Nancy Holder told me, I think Patricia Bray told me, the resident adviser told me and my fellow students told me. So I’m doing it. I’m going to submit again before August is finished, and I’ve set a tentative goal of reaching 42 new rejections in the year after I left Odyssey.

Part of what I’ll need to get me to that goal, as well as a willingness to face the rejection again, is a willingness to accept something short of an ideal perfection in my writing. Basically, if a story’s as good as I can make it right now, then it doesn’t get to sit on the hard drive for months as I learn more about writing; I pound the digital pavement and start sending it out. Yeah, I’m going to learn more about writing in the meantime, and use what I’ve learned to write better stories; maybe I’ll be able to revise something in between rejections, or maybe it’d be better not. But I can’t let the process bottleneck at the end. Keep writing, keep revising, keep submitting.

What have I been working on lately?

I thought I’d bring all of you up to speed on a few things.

• The ‘Request for dedicated readers’ that I answered at critters.org is going fairly well – I’m up to around page 125 out of 184, so more or less on track for finishing by the end of the month. I’m liking the story so far, and hopefully I’ll have some helpful feedback to share with the author.
• New smartphone apps! I’ve been learning some good tricks with NS Basic App Studio, and have completed little apps for date calculator, (figuring the difference in days between two dates or the date result of offsetting an input date by a particular number,) and a data collection front end that feeds into a web application back end. I’ll post some screen captures in a few days if I remember.
• The Straight Dope Message Board short fiction contest went well, though I didn’t win in the voting. But I really like my story, which actually took the character of Lisa from Chatterboxes, which is fundamentally a speculative contemporary sci-fi book, and put her into an urban fantasy scenario, learning sorcery from a teacher who isn’t quite what she expected.
• I’m a little behind on my goal of submitting a story a week this month – I’ve done two, and I want to make a few more revisions to the Landing based on my critique tracking results before sending it out again.
• I’ve nearly finished the second out of three fandom chapter updates I wanted to make in May – this one is ‘Children of the Molecule’, my Roswell/Doctor Who crossover, which is finally drawing towards an end.
• And I’ve written a new scene for ‘The Long Way Home’, with Naveli getting Ereyu as a pet ferret.

It actually looks somewhat impressive when I type it out in a list like that.