A Monotonous Monologue

Moving on after yesterday's submission palooza, I'm now working on my "Berlin Wall" dark fantasy story. Once again, it's a piece that's been sitting on the hard drive for ages not really doing much, and then wham! all of a sudden it's screaming to be finished. And best of all, I'm able to oblige. After this morning's session at the keyboard, it's pretty much done. It just needs a week of steady polishing to become my fourth new story for 2012, and once it's right, it'll be perfect for a certain magazine that does themed issues (I hope the mag's editor agrees).

I hope this trend continues (it won't, but I can dream, can't I?). I'm feeling so on top of things that I might even dig out the bear story I wrote way back when I started this blog and of which I'm quite fond. It didn't do so well out in the world (rejected 8 times), and has been licking its wounds since 15/10-10, when it was mauled by one editor, but now might be a good time to gently pull out those broken stories, take another look at them, and see if they're fixable.

Actually, after a quick check (I love my notebooks and logs), I've discovered that my memory is again playing tricks, that last editor's reaction to the bear story casting a pall over earlier comments. Sure the bear story was bagged, but before that it also garnered 'solid tale' and 'I liked this quite a bit but...' from other editors, so perhaps I can salvage it.

There, that was a boring post, eh? This is a prime example of why one should never ask a writer about their work :)

The 'Z' Word

After an hour of work on them this morning and another three hours of editing this evening, the undead bears are finally on their way. Phew! Deadline achieved. Hooray! Most atmospherically, there is an awesomely full moon tonight – perfect for the sending of (tasteful and sensitive) zombie manuscripts. There, I used it – the ‘Z’ word.

In between, there was the usual domestic stuff and a nice, relaxing movie full of bombs, chemicals, mind games, buckets of blood, operating tables and creatively wielded power tools.

Ya gotta love a revenge flick that has a character who quotes von Clausewitz.

Tentacles, trees or trollop?

The dead bear story (well, technically there’s more than one dead bear) is almost ready to go thanks to the fact that I wagged work yesterday (things are slow there this time of the year, so it was ok) and spent seven hours on it. I’ll send it off on Saturday.

And so my mind is now turning to the next project – should I finally finish the big, dense SF tale about spacefaring sea creatures, get further into the lighter piece about trees and colourful little monkey-folk, or start the first draft of the Egyptian floozy story? Hmmm…

Gaol House Blog

After six hours of flat out writing, the bear story (well, technically it's a dead bear story) is up and standing on its wobbly, little, new-story legs. That leaves me just 4 mornings of equally flat out editing to transform it into a lean, mean, galloping machine of 3-4000 words. Ladies and Gentlemen, place your bets.

In between, to get a break from the keyboard and feel the sunlight on my face, I went wandering around town and ended up high on a hill at the Old Goal:














It would, if I could convince the shire to turn it over to me, make a perfect writing lair.

There's a bear in it.

Good news that put a spring in my step today: two stories that I submitted to the same anthology have both been put on the short list. So, they might publish both. Or one. Or none, as occurred recently in a similar situation.

The bear story is up and running. I’ve laid down the beginning, and have already mapped out the middle and end, so I think it’ll be a reasonably co-operative piece. Hopefully it’ll be ready to send off by the end of the month.