Writing fast

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment


So it’s the end of March and I’m looking at where I am with my writing. My goal is to write 300,000 words during the course of the year. Publishable words, that is. Certainly the goal is changing as I go, and feedback on the rejections, the hold-requests and acceptances is helping with my focus (I did add into the goal that I also want to publish 300,000 words during the year – not counting reprints).

One thing I hadn’t figured on, however, was a big change in the structure of tutoring: much more online, more hours and more deadlines spread through the year. I had been looking at having big blocks of time between the portfolios to really focus on writing, and those blocks have turned out to be very small. This spread has, at the moment, meant that I’m writing alongside the tutoring and so, somehow, still maintaining my minimum of 1000 words a day (I do have a day job as well as the part-time tutoring in case you think I’m just goofing off).

I have written a complete novel, seven stories of various lengths (from 665 words up to 13,000) and I’m currently half-way through the next novel. The first novel has been (self) published, as have four of the stories (two under pen names) – one of those on MicroHorror, rather than self-published (that’s the 665 word flash fiction piece). The other stories are on submission with publishers, or still being tinkered with (I might be writing pulp, but I’m going to fine-tune the literary story for the national competition).

So, a quarter of the way through the year and I’m just a little ahead of a quarter of my publishing target (80,000 words published) and more than halfway towards my total goal: more than 150,000 words written so far. I’m surprised, stunned and stoked that it’s going this well this early. I don’t know if I’ll manage another 150,000 in the next quarter (tutoring does hot-up a little), but the momentum is there. And I still have more ideas than I have time to write.

A music interlude

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

With all my focus on being a pulp fiction writer these days, on occasion I neglect the music side. Many years ago, unable to find enough ambient music to listen to while writing, I began making my own. Most of it was pretty awful – not even listenable by me – but some of it was okay. Over time, I got better too. Even to the point that some of my music has been released on some netlabels and has been played on the radio and by DJs. (This is also the reason why the blog URL is venusvulturenews – the music comes out under the moniker Venus Vulture, and music was why I first started the blog). It’s been a while since Pylon Suite came out on Zenapolae, but it was cool to see it very positively reviewed recently on acts of silence. I am slowly working on new music, but it’s more sporadic these days: more will definitely be coming.

Pylon Suite is about 40 minutes long and is intended to be background music while doing more concentrated activities (such as writing). It’s a free download.

Writing well and writing badly

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As I progress through my “year of writing pulp”, I’m certainly learning a lot about myself as a writer. As with any writer, I have ups and downs and I have stories that are more successful (in the storytelling sense) than others. Sometimes it’s easy to feel down when a story isn’t working out. I begin to wonder if I’ll ever have another decent story in me. I guess I’m always measuring against my last best story. And that may be two or three (or more?) stories back.

The reality is that (as with most writers again) I feel like I’m getting better in general. See the graph of story quality here, with the zero to one hundred as the quality measure and the left to right as progress over time. In the early days most (ie, all) of my stories were lousy (say, a fifteen on the quality scale – at least they had reasonable grammar), but over time I’m getting better at the process of storytelling. Sometimes I stumble a little and drop down the quality line, but the general trend seems to be towards the upper end. (You understand, of course, that the ‘quality’ graph here is a purely arbitrary thing, for the sake of illustration. It’s not something I can measure in a scientific way).

This thought perhaps comes out of struggling with a chapter of my new novel that felt dead and lifeless and was a struggle to write; and then going into the next chapter which almost burned up my keyboard it was coming out so fast and easily. A novel is different to a story (that dull-ish chapter has a place in terms of pace and the mindset of the character), though I can see how some of my stories might have been dullish in places (or right through).

Pace is still something I’m learning about – recent rejection letter feedback suggested that one of my longer stories, while very good, did “drag quite a bit in quite a few places”. That’s kind of the opposite to some other feedback on another story (an accepted one – “Pan Am 617 Heavy”, which you can read here at Bewildering Stories) that pointed out (rightly) that the story was “somewhat relentless: the action is non-stop and neither the characters, nor the reader, seem to get a moment to breathe” (I’m paraphrasing those comments here). That kind of feedback certainly informa how I’m looking at my action/pulp stories now: time to breathe without dragging. It seems like good writing advice all around.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to improving on my last best story.

The value of a good cover

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

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Currently I do the illustrations for all of my book covers. I have a little bit of an art background (in fact have even had some exhibitions), so while I’m no professional I like to think that I have a reasonable idea of how to make a reasonable picture. Sometimes my covers work and sometimes not so much. Case in point here is my cover for my story Stone Goddess. I had the idea – to suit the story – of a pile of rocks that kind of looks like a statue. I attempted a blend of the rocks with the image of the statue (all rendered in Bryce). There are some elements that work, but I’m not convinced that this cover is going to sell many copies of the story (I think the story is one of my best, but so far has sold zero copies on Smashwords).

I was following Jeff Ambrose (another writer who’s inspired me on writing goals) and found his post about working on his covers. Now I though his covers were pretty good to start with, but some of his new ones are just leaving me in the dust. Look at the one here (used with his permission for illustrative purposes) for his story The Stone Goddess. Wow (and yikes, practically the same title). That illustration is so professional that it ought to help him sell an awful lot of copies of the story. (I’m terrified to read his story for fear that not only is the cover better, but so is the story).

That said, he is using dreamstime (an online resource where artists sell the rights for the use of their illustrations), so the covers are going to be pretty professional. Maybe I should take a lesson from Jeff and start investing a little money, rather than time – especially when a cover isn’t working out so well.

Maybe I’ll buy one of Jesse-lee Lang’s illustrations (she did the picture on the cover of Jeff’s story), and go head-to-head with Jeff.

NB: Cover Art Copyright © by Jesse-lee-Lang, Dreamstime.com

Book in hand, typos… in hand

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 2 Comments

The proof copy of the paperback edition of The Tunnel arrived today. It’s very cool, I’ve got to say, to hold the physical result in my hands (as you can see from that goofy grin). The idea of a proof copy, I guess, is that final check before it gets properly published. I knew there would be some tinkering with the cover to do, but what I didn’t expect was to open it up and spot a typo immediately. This is after three proofreads (one by me, and one by someone else [who’s not to blame at all!] and another by me). It’s just a silly thing too – an “at” when it should be “as” – which makes that sentence (“And as Morgan was leaving…”) make no sense at all. Guess I’m going to have to proof the whole thing again. I might have to do that backwards. At least I know that the ebook version is correct (checked it just now – I guess I got the paperback proof printed before that final proofread. Silly).

Tutoring begins, writing slows

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Well, I knew this day would come and I’ve planned for it, I just hadn’t been sure that I’d be quite as far ahead of my writing goals, nor that I would be able to time the beginning of tutoring to fit with exactly what I’m writing. (I tutor in, you guessed it, creative writing).

I’m deep into the next novel (well, 18,000 words), but took a break a couple of weeks ago to write some short/long stories. I should finish the third of those today or tomorrow, then I’ll go back to the novel. That novel will be in three parts, with a long passage of time between each (the first part set in 1996, the second – which I’m about to start – in 2002, and the third will be current), so a break at the end of the first part feels healthy: the characters will have developed and that break should give me a slightly different perspective.

For the next four or five weeks I won’t be able to keep up my 1000+ words a day as I’ve been doing all year (actually much more on average, my lowest daily count was 1010 words, highest over 5500 – the total is just on 130,000 for the 75 days of 2012). It’s going to be hard to slow down, I think, but will likely help with the novel – it might be a little more considered and evenly paced. 500 a day would be nice, but it might be more like 250. Still, that’s about a page. I definitely want to hit 150,000 words by the middle of the year, and do think that with the breaks in tutoring it will be quite possible. It would be good, I think, to get this novel finished by then, and be thinking about the next one.Oh, plus a couple of stories in there too.

On the reading side, I’ve just finished Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s City of Ruins – a sci fi adventure following on from Diving into the Wreck (and numerous stories). It was a fun romp. It seemed to start a little slow, but picked up quickly and became utterly compelling. I’m looking forward to the next one in the series – (Boneyards) – which is actually already out.

Now I’m finally picking up John Irving’s Until I Find You, which somehow I missed reading when it came out. I loved Last Night in Twisted River which I did read when that came out over a year ago – actually one of my favourites of his. I expect I’ll enjoy this one. I know I’ll be reading it slow (see notes on being busy above), but actually, that’s just fine.

The Tunnel – The Hidden Dome Volume 1: new cover and updated text

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My novel The Tunnel, available at Smashwords and other ebook retailers, has a new cover (subtly nicer, I think, richer colours, better layout) and (very importantly) updated text. It’s been proofread (yet again) and more typos have been corrected, plus a few clunky sentences. I seem to have this habit of dropping the last letter from a couple of words (“her” for “here” and “the” for “they”) and missing it in initial proofreads. So now it looks better and reads better.

The little pic here is how the old cover looked, for comparison’s sake.

Careful what you wish for: rejection slips

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I got a rejection slip today. That means I’m down to thirteen live submissions.

This slip was one of the nicer ones, I’ve must say, in that it included some feedback – fair and fairly positive – from the first readers, with comments like these below:

“[T]his is a complex idea. You’ve only barely touched the surface. The writing is solid and workmanlike, but because the central concept is so complex, you’ve been unable to offer much of characterisation, or setting, or colour.”

“This should be a novella-length piece, so you can do justice to the main concept. Accepting it in this form would be wrong for both you, and [our publication].”

Fair enough. Decent food for thought. It is a very stripped back story, one that I had worked on for a long time. The first versions were five or six thousand words long and really didn’t work so well. The final version is 1600. That’s barely more than flash fiction.

Perhaps this is a case for writing a longer version (again). I’ve done that before – my novel Rotations originated from a flash story, as did my forthcoming novel The Room (that flash story – “Don’t Sleep Downstairs” – is still available at Flashes In The Dark.

I had planned on writing a couple of short novels this year, amongst all the other stuff, and I am writing longer these days (that rejected story was written and rewritten quite some time ago).

Now that I think about it my latest novel – The Tunnel – was going to be a short novel (it went to over 60,000 words when I was expecting 25,000 – as I was getting into it I realised that it had to be bigger). I’m feeling more confident with longer forms these days (most of my current submissions are from 5000 to 20,000 words), a far cry from my period of focusing on flash fiction.

I guess that’s a project for later in the year – take that “solid and workmanlike” writing and develop the story with some characterisation, setting and colour. 🙂

In the meantime, the story is going back out to find a publisher who might like it in this form (I still think it works as is – a spare and stark piece). Then I’ll be back up to fourteen live submissions.

Fourteen submissions out and waiting

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Well, waiting and writing, writing, writing. I have fourteen submissions out with publishers right now. I know for some writers that might be a pretty low number, but for me it’s up amongst the highest at any one time. I find I get both excited, and concerned. Excited that some of these stories that have been out for a while might be moving up from the slush pile to more senior editors (yay). Concerned that they maybe never arrived, or have been lost. I need to keep track of those enquiry times – some publications say enquire after a week (I don’t have any subs with those ones at the moment – their turnaround is pretty slick), some say wait ninety days before enquiring.

It’s hard not to be excited, and then always a little disappointing when it comes back after ninety days with a form rejection. Still, that means it can be live again with another market.

So I get the goofball award, but at least it got me writing with focus…

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 2 Comments

In my last post, I bleated on about my best story not even making the long list of a competition (when a slightly weaker story had made the shortlist in another round of the same contest). Well, it turns out I was reading the wrong list. I was reading the (just published) list for the just previous round of the contest, where I’d entered a much weaker story. In fact, they’d already been polite enough to personally email me and let me know that my (not especially very good) story for that round hadn’t made the finals (no surprise there).

This means three things. First: my current best story ever is theoretically still “live” – since it’s in the contest’s current round, not lost from the list they’d published.

Second: I was being a goofball and I need to keep better track of things.

Third: thinking I need to just write better is a great motivator. I completed a new story over the weekend, and have begun yet another one. Talk about motivated. I felt like I was writing with fire. Now I don’t know that either of these stories is better than that other one, but I raged into the writing of them and I think they’re up there with my best. Good enough, in fact, to enter into those next rounds of the contest, when those submissions open up.