Genre fiction
Two authors I blog – Jodi andLaura both have flash stories in the January issue of 10flash.
10Flash is a new discovery for me – a quarterly that publishes ten genre stories in each issue, all flash and all based around a common theme. This issue’s theme was “an encounter at dusk on a lonely road”.
Keeping track of Laura and Jodi’s prolific outputs is getting exhausting. Whew. Great work – very exciting watching these careers flourish.
Ever one to shatter the illusions and confound his audience, Angel Zapata has a couple of delicious and challenging poems in the latest issue of The Poem Factory. Great stuff.
Members of PEN – the New Zealand Society of Authors, have access, at modest cost, to a private house with picturesque views at quiet and somewhat secluded Foxton Beach (try Google – they’ve even done streetview of some of the township). I’ll be decamping there soon for around a week to have a change of pace and loads of writing. My plan is to take a bunch of manuscripts of stories in early draft form and work on revisions as I sit in the upstairs lounge gazing through the picture windows across the estuary, plus lots of evening walks and maybe even a little ocean swimming. Wonderful.
Jodi steps her career up a notch with an excellent interview on Flashes in the Dark. Great to gain a little more insight into Jodi – Haiku, love of classic literature, approach to writing – things which come through in her writing in subtle ways. Jodi’s new story Spindled Souls on Flashes in the Dark from a few days back reinforces all that too. Big ups to Jodi and Lori for the interview.
My story The Vampire Gustav at the End of the Universe published in Bewildering Stories, and already selected for their final quarter 2009 quarterly review, has also been selected in their Annual Review 2009 Editors’ Choices, issues 319 – 365. This was one of my least plot-driven stories of the year, so I’m pleased and honoured that it’s being selected for these reviews.
Whew. It’s pretty loose, but the first draft is done. That’s 6200 words today – which is more than I would normally manage on a day set aside for writing, let alone a day with fifteen dozen other things going on. So I have a full draft of The Rotated, now the real work begins as I try to knock it into shape. So good to have belted it out before 2010 starts. Gonna take a little break from it for a couple of weeks and work on some other stories, then come at it fresh. Mood, elated, exhausted.
Taking a break from the writing, we went to see the Swedish film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. A wonderful and engaging piece of film making. I love the atmosphere of Scandinavian films – the long shots of cars traversing lonely desolate highways and how the locale a climate become almost a character in the film. We saw Jar City, from Iceland, on DVD a few weeks back and in many ways it’s a similar film – a mystery, with great twists and turns. Both remind me in some ways of The Sweet Hereafter, a film which startled me when I saw it, and which lingers in my mind.
Novel update – it’s about 8.15pm here, so there’s three and three quarter hours until the end of the year. Will I make it? I think there’s still a couple of thousand words to go … so I’m not out partying
Okay, another 1500 words in the last 24 hours. It seems slow, but I feel like I’m threading a dozen needles here as I bring all the threads together in a finish that will make sense. It has diverged so much from my original outline (for the better, I think) that there are many more aspects to manage than I’d first expected. Perhaps another 3000 to finish it off? Mood, excited, tense, despondent, elated.
Quick post here, in between busy-ness. I’ve moved the novel ahead by around 1000 words since my last post, and I’ll get some more done right now. It is a little slower now as I try to make sure things are really tight as they tie up.
No posts for a few days – I have my head down, trying to complete my novel before the new year. I’m about five or six thousand words out, but with family stuff and holidays it’s actually hard to find concentrated time work on it. December 31st feels like such a psychological point – new year, for new writing and it’s good to work to a target.
The novel is an expansion of my flash fiction story The Rotated, as published on Infinite Windows. Incisive editor Mr Tannenbaum asked me why I’d written the story as flash fiction – there seemed to be so much more to it – the concept, their relationship, why do the invaders come, etc. Sure enough, there was so much more to explore. The story is sitting at around 60,000 words right now, so it is on the shortish side for a print novel, but the plan, if the editor likes it (current signs are good) then it will be serialized on Infinite Windows. I will be making the story nicely Gordian, I hope, in the next few days. Then of course, will be spending coming months on revisions and re-writes. I just need to get the draft done by the 31st … I may not post here for a few days as I try to keep my online time to a minimum.
Triple V Publishing 