• Meta,  Writing

    On Themes…

    Ashe Theme
    New Theme!

    Certain things stopped working on my old theme, Structure. Probably because it was from 2009. I mean…color me surprised, but apparently software — including WordPress themes! — does update from time to time, and if you don’t apply those updates, things stop working. Who knew? So my menus have been not working for . . . a long time. And I was too busy to worry about it, and finally today I just made time and dealt with it. Not that I didn’t like Structure. I loved it. I even had several people comment on it and say that they really liked the “simplicity” of it. And that was what drew me to it. But they wanted . . . a considerable amount of money to update it, because to do that I had to go to the pro version, and . . . well . . . not enough people read this blog for me to spend that kind of money. :) I’m already paying for six domains, and that’s more than enough.

    Hopefully, this will be a theme I like, and can be better about keeping up with updates. Assuming they don’t want to charge me to update.

    I’m still learning all the bits and pieces of the new theme. Seems that there are many new features of themes since the last time I spent any time playing with it, and I’m still trying to figure out how to get the footnote numbers to start over with each post on the main page, so until I figure that out, well . . . it’ll be easier to click on a title and go read the individual page instead of reading them from the main page. The whole menu situation is still not ironed out because there’s a ton of setup and I just need to figure out how menus work in this new decade of WordPress and just deal with it. For now, there is one menu, “About,” and the sub-pages associated with that. I’ve updated my Podcasts I Listen To page quite a bit, because I finally got the personal project I’ve been working on in my spare time working well enough to want to get it to output pre-formatted content for that page.

    Sure, I could make a comment, here, about the whole ‘gosh, it’s been over two years since I updated my blog’ thing, and ‘gosh, what a year 2020 was, huh?’ thing, or even the ‘writing? was that the thing with the blank pages that I’m supposed to fill up with words?’ thing. But that would be calling attention to the fact that it’s been over two years since I updated my blog and offering excuses, which I’m absolutely not going to do; that 2020 was a global hellscape of awful, which everyone already knows; and that I haven’t written substantially since early 2020, but no one but me and my writers group really cares about that, so I’ll not bore you with it.

    Suffice it to say, things happened, situations changed, priorities altered. We move forward.

    I have been writing, but not on a regular basis. I’m getting back to some stories I started and never finished, and I hope to Get Right On That™ Real Soon Now™ I have lots of ideas for stories and for changes to my neverending novel.

    With any luck, I’ll have more to share soon. I’m working on getting my home office set up and usable because as it turns out, I’m now permanently working from home, so there’s that. Once that’s done, I’ll have a dedicated place other than my dining room table and living room easy chair in which to dedicate time to working / writing.

    Watch this space. Or don’t. I don’t control you.

  • Meta,  Reading,  Writing

    Writing Report, April 2019

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    April didn’t go quite as intended.

    On the one hand, I did cross another milestone: I wrote “The End” at the end(?) of my novel(?). Use use the (?)s because . . . well . . . it was the logical “end” of the story, although it does leave things in a rather prickly situation. Which is great if you know there’s going to be a book 2. Not so much if it’s supposed to be stand-alone. But I’ve never envisioned this as a stand-alone. And only once I get it rearranged and retooled will it be a novel. But as it stands as I write this between projects at work on April 30th, it is not a novel. “Novel” implies a sort of structure. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Character arcs. Coherent . . . ness. As it stands, it is 110,000+ words of . . . loosely related anecdotes involving the same characters and in the same universe.

    So, yeah, it is not a novel. There are threads left dangling, characters mentioned once and never brought up again, a suddenly appearing thirteen-year-old son of a secondary character who was convenient to use as a hostage in the final confrontation scene . . . Kid doesn’t even have a name. I called him [HAL’S SON].

    I discovery-wrote my way into some cool stuff, including finding the perfect location in which to set much of my action (and causing a huge difference in the different parts of the story as I have three locations. The final one is a place that is very Atlanta, which is what I want. If my story could take place anywhere, then what’s the point of setting it in Atlanta other than convenience? Most Atlantans will recognize the location I’ve chosen if they have ever driven through Spaghetti Junction, and those who aren’t in Atlanta can google the location and see the structure I’m describing. So it works out.

    Last month, I said, naïvely, that I wanted to finish the thing in April, “so that I can start on the rewrite.”

    Yeah.

    About that . . .

    No. :)

    What had happened was . . . I kept coming up with things to change the plot, not augment it. New ideas about how my magic system works. Who can do what and why. (More of) What my adversary’s reasons are for doing what he’s doing. Etc. So I work through those by free-writing them, and then I also have other ideas for stories, and I’ve written those down with enough notes to help me remember everything without inflicting another Skullcosm on myself.

    Because that was all infinitely more interesting than continuing to attempt to revise and submit some of my finished stories. I mean, I did spruce up one called “C Is for Clowns that Creep Through the Yard” (alt title: “Coulromisia”) and submitted that as my work to be critiqued for Write Here, Write Now, which starts day after tomorrow (as I type this). It’s one of the darker things I’ve written. We’ll see what the critters have to say. :) But that is the only story I did anything with in April. I didn’t even submit the rejected story from March to another market because, frankly, I forgot. <sigh>

    Here’s my report.

    April 2019 Writing Report
    April 2019 Writing Report

    Goal Progress

    Finish This Damned Novel – Yay!

    Rewrite This Damned Novel – . . .

    Three More Novel Outlines – Did that as one of my free-writing. So I have enough on all three to participate on a plot break on any or all of them. I think. We shall see which one I pick. :) The problems I have with all three is that they’re too similar to things that already exist, and I need more. Or maybe abandon the ideas if I can’t make them into anything coherent.

    Write Here, Write Now – I leave tomorrow (as I type this; May 1, 2019)

    Read Forty Books – Meh. Maybe if they’re really short books, I can catch up? I have read a lot of short stories and reference stuff. But those don’t count on Goodreads. Well, except the reference books. I have one on autopsies, one on blood spatter, and one on crime scene investigation. You know, a little light reading. :)

    Submit Things To Places – May. May is a good month to send Things out. To Places.


    1. The word I was fishing around for was ‘cohesion.’
  • Writing

    Writing Report, March 2019

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    March was pretty decent. I crossed a milestone I haven’t crossed in quite a while: I wrote 100,000 words on a “novel.” I use quotes because although I did pass 100,000 words in the Scrivener project where I’m writing my novel, many of those words are not . . . good words. They are, in fact, crappy words. Words that I will end up deleting and rewriting because although they seemed the thing to write at the time, they no longer actually make sense in the full novel as I’ve come to understand it. Scenes I don’t need, repetitions of things I’ve already said, exposition that’s more for me than any reader it might eventually have. And I’m nearing the “end” of the “novel,” as well. I wrote the Big Climactic Scene™ — two of them, actually — and only have a the Final Confrontation with Evil™ where the Hero Triumphs™ but at Great Cost™ and then all that cleanup stuff. You know the ‘Bilbo and Sam go back to the Shire and it’s not the same place they left’ part that has to be written but whether or not I’ll keep it all is up for debate.

    I look forward to bringing this sucker to a close in April so that I can start on the rewrite. After I confiscate one of the big white-boards at work after hours and really make myself understand the different plot threads and how they all weave together. I know there are things I introduced that I never came back to. Characters I introduced and then forgot. Characters that I may not even need. And just tonight, I realized that a character I already introduced has a role to fill that cleans up a rather tidy piece of backstory that was bugging me. And would probably stand out instantly to any reader, as well, so that’s good.

    Another thing I did in March was to start looking at some of my older stories with an eye toward making them publishable. I got a rejection on a story from a market I want to eventually make it into. The story I sent wasn’t really in their wheelhouse, but it also wasn’t really out of it, either. So it was a gamble, and it didn’t pay off. I’ll be submitting that story to the next market on my list in April, and hopefully getting a second one ready for submission so I can have two out. And then three. And then four. And then . . .

    I did really well on writing from a consistency standpoint this month. Reading . . . slightly less so. But I read almost every day. When I visited my mother, I didn’t get any reading done, but I also missed a day or two later in the month because of various other reasons. It means it’ll take a little longer to “level up,” but I’ll get there eventually.

    Another thing I did this month was the create yet another spreadsheet (Have I mentioned how much I love Excel? Because I love it a lot.) that will “pretty-print” my little progress table. I tried going from Excel to HTML and it did . . . some odd things. So I abandoned that path and just took a screen shot of the ‘pretty-print’ for March and this is it, right here.

    March 2019 Writing Report
    March 2019 Writing Report

    Goal Progress

    Finish This Damned Novel – So. Close. Probably another 7500 to 10,000 words, and I”ll be done. And then the real fun of rewriting will begin.

    Three More Novel Outlines – Some of it happened? I have . . . things that resemble outlines of part of two of them. I have thirty-three more days to get something that resembles an outline for at least one of them written before . . .

    Write Here, Write Now – I can almost taste Baltimore. It tastes . . . like mouthwash.

    Read Forty Books – It was probably not a great idea to pick Jenn Lyonsepic 560-page tome The Ruin of Kings as the next book I read, but OMG YOU GUYS IT’S SO DAMNED GOOD AND YOU NEED TO BE READING IT RIGHT NOW. There are seventeen chapters of it up on Tor’s site for you to read for free. I linked to it up there! Go! Click! You can get hooked like I did! I’m sure I’ll catch up after I’m done with it and read lots of shorter things. :)

    Submit Things To Places – April. April is a good month to send Things out. To Places.


    1. I do not say this to ‘shame’ my mother, who will read this. I say it because I genuinely would rather spend time with her than read. And I did read some while I was at her house, but it was mostly web pages, and those are hard for me to track. :)
    2. Ten Internet Points to anyone who actually gets this. You can spend them precisely nowhere! But they’ll be yours to keep and be proud of for literally minutes to come!
  • Reading,  Writing

    Writing Report, February 2019

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    February was productive, but it wasn’t as productive as previous months. I wrote, but not a lot. But I did write every single day, rain or shine, in the mood or not, tired or perky, and made progress on short stories and my novel. I even <gasp> liked some of what I wrote! I KNOW! It’s so not me. I even submitted one of my older stories to another market in the hopes that it’ll find a home. Yes, I should submit more stories and more often. Working on that. Maybe an addition to my spreadsheet . . .

    In addition to writing, I gave myself the goal of reading every day, as well. I added another spreadsheet (because who doesn’t love spreadsheets?) and started tracking minutes of reading, using a level system similar to the one I use for the writing, and also rewarding myself for reading more than one type of thing. My categories are “Audiobook,” “Short Story,” “Novel,” and “Non-Fiction.” Any reading I have to do for work or if I read a long article on a website, that goes in “non-fiction.” Anything shorter than a “novel” falls in the “short story” category, even if it’s ~40,000 words. I may add another section for ‘gaming’ because I find myself now playing Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition online with friends biweekly, and there’s a lot of reading involved. But it’s not really a novel or a short story or audiobook, and it’s certainly not non-fiction.

    I have daily issues of Daily Science Fiction going back many years. I’ve made an actual dent in that since I read quite a few of them per day, now. I also have issues of Clarkesworld that have been collecting, as well as Crossed Genres and I just became a patron of Flash Fiction Online, so my short-stories itch is being scratched! My friend Jenn Lyons also just had her book The Ruin of Kings come out, and it’s next on my list! I was going to read the e-book version, but the footnotes plays havoc with the e-format, so I’m just gonna have to go old-style and read the dead-tree version. :) As a note, I attended Jenn’s book launch party at Eagle Eye Book Shop here in the Atlanta area, and she had the most amazing cake. Red velvet with raspberry filling. To. Die. For. And it was a 3-D rendering of her book cover.

    For February, 2019, my stats are

    • Words: 22,608
      • Daily average words: 807
    • Time: 1,250 minutes (20 hours, 50 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 45 min
    • Average words/hour: 1,085
    • Chain: 151 days
    • Level: 6 as of 22 February
    • Quota: 450 words per day until 21 February, then 500 words/day

    For February, 2019, my Reading stats are

    • Minutes: 1,495 (24 hours, 55 minutes)
      • Daily average minutes: 53
    • Days on which I read:
      • Audiobook: 0
      • Short Story: 23
      • Novel: 5
      • Non-Fiction: 3
    • Chain: 40 days
    • Level: 2 as of 22 February
    • Quota: 20 minutes per day through 21 February, 25 minutes per day thereafter

    Goal Progress

    Finish This Damned Novel – I’m writing the first pass at the first really huge scene where the protagonist and antagonist meet and there are fireworks. Now I have to figure out what happens after that, and what he tells his companions. Not everything is something he’s proud of or wants to admit.

    Three More Novel Outlines – I wrote down a bunch of thoughts on one of them the other day, in preparation for the next item on my list. I’d like to do a plot break on it, and for that to happen, I have to have . . . you know, some kind of vague idea of what happens in the story.

    Write Here, Write Now – I’m getting excited about seeing a bunch of friends I haven’t seen in a while and be in a room for several days with other writers talking writing and playing a lot — a lot — of Cards Against Humanity. And Werewolves. And maybe other stuff. But also writing.

    Read Forty Books – I’m behind, but at least I already have read several books. Better than last year. :)

    Submit Things To Places – I sent one out! So. Many. More. To go.

  • Meta,  Reading,  Weekend Warrior,  Writing

    Writing Report, January 2019 + Goals

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    This month I had incentive to write beyond just wanting to write. I belong to an online writers discussion forum called Codex Writers. Each year beginning the first full Friday-Sunday weekend in January, we have something called Weekend Warrior. I’ve talked about it before, but rather than giving you a link and making you go elsewhere, I’ll just explain it here, again. On Friday night, we’re given six prompts. By Sunday night, we write a 750-word (or less) flash story using one or more of the prompts and upload it anonymously to the site. Once the deadline has passed, participants download all the stories in our divisions (no one can read all the stories, so we’re divided into smaller subgroups randomly, to make the task easier and more enjoyable), read them for critique, rate them (again, anonymously), make a short comment explaining our rating, and upload those ratings by Friday evening . . . at which point the next week’s prompts go up and we start all over again. It’s like a slush pile, only better because you get comments. :)

    The prize at the end? Five new stories, assuming you participate each week. And the knowledge that you can write a story to spec in just over two days. And the completely anonymous feedback from a plethora of readers — who are also writers — some of whom loved your story and some of whom . . . didn’t. But now you know why they did or didn’t.

    So far, we’re in week four, which means I’ve written four flash stories in January. Two of those have already been turned into longer stories and one of those (now 4700 words) has been taken to my Tuesday night critique group for a more thorough examination. It needs some editing based on what my group said, and then I’ll put it through one more round of critiques before obsessively editing it for a couple more weeks and then, finally, sending it out into the world even though I hate it, now, every syllable. Such is writing. :)

    The way I do Weekend Warrior, now, is to get the prompts and just do a free-association on each one, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, until something gets past the part of my brain that filters out bad ideas and starts to tickle the creamy center. Then I elaborate on that one (or those ones) until I can’t think of anything else. That’s all on Friday night. By Saturday, I probably have an idea what I’m writing, but sometimes I don’t write it at all, but continue to freely associate. I like to let it marinate and dry-age in my brain until Sunday, at which point I start writing the actual story . . . and find out that the story I have in my head is not what comes out of my fingers onto the screen at. all. but is usually better in some ways. I then submit it sometime after 10 pm and spend the next couple of hours obsessively proofreading and tweaking it to get it Perfect™. So for a single 750-word story, I can generate a couple thousand words over a three-day period before it gets submitted. Which is awesome from a word-count and consistency point of view. :)

    In between writing for Weekend Warrior, I’ve continued to work on my novel. It’s a giant, swirling, incoherent mess that I hope to clean up into a coherent, slightly less swirling . . . neater-thing that . . . is readable. <gestures vaguely>

    I also noticed something that started to really bug me. I use Goodreads to put in all my books. In past years, I’ve read a lot of books in a given year. But in the last couple of years, I’ve read less and less as I listen to more and more audio and watch more YouTube. This is bad. I love reading, but I’ve let it slip away. So I made another sheet in my spreadsheet for time spent reading, come up with my own formulae for levels and points and such, and am now tracking that. It’s helping me to incentivize reading something every day, whether that is a single short story, part of a novel, or something non-fiction. I also count audiobooks, because regardless what anyone says, I count that as reading. Is it exactly the same thing? No. But I still absorb the story. My comprehension is still high. I remember where I left off just like I do with dead-tree or dead-electron books. So it counts as reading, for me. Your mileage may vary.

    I also thought it might be informative if I made another spreadsheet with all of the stories I have in various stages of completion, regardless of length, subject, or whatever.

    there are over ninety

    Twenty-six of those are the Alphabet series I wrote. Another 30+ are from Weekend Warrior.

    Also? I love making spreadsheets. So there’s that. :)

    For January, 2019, my stats are

    • Words: 31,362
      • Daily average words: 1,012
    • Time: 1,645 minutes (27 hours, 25 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 53 min
    • Average words/hour: 1,143
    • Chain: 123 days
    • Level: 5 as of 21 January
    • Quota: 400 words per day until 20 December, then 450 words/day

    For January, 2019, my Reading stats are

    • Minutes: 2,148 (35 hours, 48 minutes)
      • Daily average minutes: 77
    • Days on which I read:
      • Audiobook: 7
      • Short Story: 12
      • Novel: 9
      • Non-Fiction: 7
    • Chain: 13 days (I missed 3 days; 13 was the longest chain, of which there were 3)
    • Level: 1
    • Quota: 20 minutes per day

    Goals

    Yeah. I’m not big on ‘goals’ because they sound too much like ‘resolutions,’ but here’s some vagueness.

    1. I want to finish this damned novel and finally have something for my novel-writing group to read. I’m the only one who hasn’t had at least one novel put through the group, and some are working on a third. So I’m behind. By April 1, I want the rough draft done. The one no one will ever see. The one that gets turned into the alpha and beta versions.
    2. I have ideas for three more novels unrelated to the urban fantasy series for which the current WIP is book 1. It’d be nice to at least start outlining those.
    3. I’m attending one writing-related fun-thing this year, in May in Baltimore. Since I pay myself minimum wage for writing and I’m now writing every day, I have enough put aside to indulge one trip.
    4. I want to read at least forty books/audiobooks this year.
    5. I know this is a vague, non-SMART goal, but here it is anyway: submit, dammit. Stop self-rejecting.

    1. For each contest on Codex — and there are quite a few — ‘anonymous’ is achieved by selecting what we call a nom de guerre, which is used instead of our real names, so you may be reading a story by “George, Absolute Prefect of Saturn” and find out later that it was <insert famous author’s name here> and you never knew. Or you may find out that you absolutely love the writing of “Lulu, Queen of the Zorgs” and find out it’s someone whose name you’re unfamiliar with, but now you know to look for it in all the publications.
  • Meta,  Writing

    Writing Report, December 2018 + Year-End Wrap-Up

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    December was a fairly decent month. In spite of a somewhat major holiday and spending quite a bit of time with my mother both at her house and on a vacation trip to south Georgia, I managed to write at least the minimum number of words every day, even when I had Internet speeds that reminded me of 110-Baud modems.

    I had some interesting revelations about a couple of my characters and made copious notes to go back and add some conflict between my two main characters to set up something that happens about halfway through the novel.

    I also finally managed to figure out exactly what my antagonist is doing and why. Like, the details of it. I know that seems silly that I have an outline and am writing on the novel and only just now figured that out. I had the gist of it — with the understanding that it would probably come to me during the writing, which it did — but not the reasoning behind it or the exact order of events. Once I figured out some stuff about the magic in my universe and how it’s used by different mages (and therefore what my antagonist is doing), I was able to make that leap. My notes are in-line in the document itself, so it’s not like I’m going to lose it. :)

    The whole Safari issue is really frustrating. My self-control has never been good, so knowing that I can get to Facebook on Safari means I might as well not block it on my other browsers. I hope they fix that issue (which is a feature they added). Many is the night I’ve gotten my writing for the day done at 3:00 AM because I procrastinated.

    Maybe I can make that part of the ‘game.’ If I go to Facebook after 8 PM, it’s some sort of penalty. Hmm. I’ll work on it.

    For December, 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 27,492
      • Daily average words: 887
    • Time: 1461 minutes (24 hours, 21 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 47:08 min
    • Average words/hour: 1129
    • Chain: 92 days
    • Level: 4 as of 18 December
    • Quota: 350 words per day until 18 December, then 400 words/day

    Yearly Wrap-Up

    For 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 127,701. That’s well over a novel’s worth.
      • Daily average words: 946
    • Time: 9356 minutes (6 days, 11 hours, 56 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 58:29 min
    • Average words/hour: 819
    • Longest Chain: 92 days
      • Number of chains: 2
      • Total Writing Days: 160
    • Level: 4 as of 31 December
    • Points: 5472 as of 31 December

    There were days prior to August that I wrote and recorded my time, but not the number of words (Really, past me?), so the totals above include that writing time, which is why the words per hour are probably a bit off. In 2019, I will count words and time each time I write, so those numbers won’t get “off” by too much.

    My best (most productive) month was September, with a grand total of 37,243 words written. My worst month was August with only 15,649, but I was only writing for 13 days in August, so that could probably be prorated, but I’ll let it stand. :)

    The most time I spent writing was in September, as well, with 2048 minutes, total, but a surprise is that January was second with 1546 minutes, total, but I didn’t record the number of words I wrote. I suspect a good bit of it was while Weekend Warrior was going on. This was well before I rediscovered the magic writing spreadsheet and started using it daily, but I was using the time-tracking app and kept track of how long I wrote, because that makes sense.

    I plan to keep this going for 2019. I have a good chunk of a rough draft of a novel that I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to write since 2008. It has gone through a number of massive changes as I’ve learned things about writing and revised my characters and my world and figured out a plot that I hope makes sense. Well over half of the total 127,701 words were on short stories, blog posts, the outline, and free-writing to get to something outline-like. Right now, the ‘novel’ is a hopeless mess that needs a lot of help before I would consider letting eyes other than mine see it. I hope that by . . . let’s say April? . . . I might have something resembling a rough draft. <crosses fingers>

    Oh, and you bet your sweet bippy this blog post is going towards my words for 1/1/2019. :) Let’s get the new year off to a decent start with some extra words!

    Magic Writing Spreadsheet 2018, complete
    Magic Writing Spreadsheet 2018, complete

    As a final bonus, if you’re at all interested in what the spreadsheet looks like, here is a screen shot of the 2018 worksheet. You can’t read it as is, but if you click on the image, then click on it again to get the magnified version, you can see every cell, should you feel the desire to do so. :)

    If anyone is interested in obtaining a copy of the sheet . . . well, I could be persuaded to share a blanked-out version. Probably. ;) Alternatively, you could use the one I link to way back in another post, the truly shared one that exists as a Google Doc where you can see everyone else’s progress as well.

    Just know that I found and corrected a major bug in it today as I was preparing the 2019 sheet for the first entry (this blog post), and that extended to the 2020 sheet. If I give you a copy, you’d be on your own for fixing stuff like that.

  • Meta,  Writing

    Well, It Was Supposed To Be a Sale

    On January 27, 2018, Johnna, a friend of mine who is in my Tuesday night writing group (The Forum Writers), sent me a link to Spectacle Magazine with a note that said, “Have you tried here? When I saw this, I thought of you and your short stories. I think you could submit something here and have success.”

    I looked at the site and discovered that they had literally just published their first issue, and that they were paying nicely.

    I had just finished editing two short stories and thought, “Why not?” One of them got sent off to Spectacle and one elsewhere. Both deadlines were sufficiently into the future that I didn’t obsess (much) over checking (much) my email (much) every day to see (much) if I had a response (much). Nada (MUCH).

    On the evening of February 15th (the submission deadline), just as I was about to shut down my computer to head upstairs to prepare for bed, *ping*.

    A new email on the account I use exclusively for writing. Well, I mean . . . it wouldn’t hurt to look, right? A rejection just before bed is nothing new, after all. So I called it up. Yep. From Spectacle.

    “Dear Gary,” yadda yadda blah blah blah “loved your submission” blah-de-blah-de-blah and here it comes . . . “and want to publish and illustrate it for an upcoming issue.” Yep! Exactly what I figured. Crap. This story is– <sound of record being scratched>

    Wait. What?

    I read it again. It still had that last sentence. And again. Still had not changed. I — and I’m a little embarrassed to admit this — got on Facebook and sent the email to a trusted friend and said, “Does this say what it looks like it says?”

    I’ve been through this before, after all. My acceptance into Viable Paradise went much the same way, including taking a printout of the email with me on the plane up to Boston just in case somewhere along the way it changed to “Psych! Your writing sucks and you should be ashamed for making us read that dreck,” so I could just slink off to a different hotel and hide for a week. I wish I were kidding.

    Impostor Syndrome is . . . yeah.

    I held the news while Spectacle worked out some issues with its author contract. The original one was . . . very rights-grabby. The second one was . . . better. Then they started working with SFWA and I figured time would tell. It was clear that the publishers were new to publishing and were trying to do better. So we were hopeful.

    By the end of April, however, I was getting worried. They were still replying to emails and saying, “We’re almost there!” Then, at the very end of April, they sent an email with the new contract (blank) for us to look over, and a note that said they were going to get the new contracts sent off to all the writers who’d had stories accepted “within the next day or so!”

    So, I waited. And I waited. May. June. The publishers stopped replying to tweets and emails. Still, I waited. And then, it was July. I withdrew my own story from consideration because it was clear to me that they were never going to send anything. I never received a response to that email. I can’t prove that they ever knew I’d retracted my submission. Issue 2 had not come out. In fact, their website had not been updated since before April. In fact, their podcast had petered out at episode 5 in May. It concerned me at the time that only one of the two publishers bothered to take any time to say a few words on the podcast, but I thought, “Hey, it’s probably a small, two-man shop and he’s busy.”

    Finally, in September, one of the other affected writers confronted them and got them to admit that they were shutting down after one issue. None of the writers whose stories had been accepted were going to see print. And those who’d been paid were the lucky ones because they got free money. But they asked the confronters to keep it under wraps so they could “reach out personally” to inform all the other writers. So they kept it under wraps. Nothing was said publicly.

    Well, now it’s December. A full year since they opened for submissions. They still have said nothing in public. They didn’t bother renewing the SSL certificate on their website, which speaks volumes. As far as anyone can determine, no writers were informed. Not even the least effort was made. So it was deemed safe to go ahead and say it: Spectacle Magazine is gone. Kaput. Done. If you got paid, keep the money and resubmit the story elsewhere. If you signed a contract and didn’t get paid, you should probably consider the contract null and void and resubmit that story elsewhere. And if you never heard squat, move on. Everyone probably already had (like me), but it reflects really poorly on the publishers to not own up to anything to the people who they kept saying they wanted to work with and communicate with. I don’t know what status the signed contracts are in from a legal point of view, but it would be truly interesting to see what the law would say about the validity of a contract that one party had no intention of ever keeping.

    So much for that. So my “first sale” turned out to be a “first bad experience” instead. Huzzah?

    Does it leave a bad taste in my mouth? Yes, it does! Does it mean I’ll never submit anything ever again? No! Does it mean I’ll be less trusting of new markets in the future? <sigh> Probably? Maybe? A little? Will I still submit to them? Probably, yes. But will I give them the benefit of even the most minuscule doubt? Hell no. Spectacle has removed that gene from my writer DNA. At the first sign of flakiness, I’m outta there.

    Back in July when I posted about this on my Facebook page and very carefully didn’t name the magazine, I said, “I think they bit off more than they could chew, and are probably scrambling to figure out what they can salvage. If they ever get their act together, I’d still like to one day publish something with them.” Well, not any more. If I ever see the names of the publishers of Spectacle associated with literally anything else, I will avoid it. Because they’ve demonstrated their true colors. They’ve shown us who they are in the most honest way possible: their (complete lack of any) actions.

    To be crystal clear: I don’t fault them for biting off more than they could chew or being not savvy in the publishing industry. Those could happen to anyone. And they seemed to be trying very hard to make their contract work, including listening to experienced writers and SFWA. What I fault them for is not behaving like responsible adults when it became clear that they were going to call it quits.


    1. This was not mere speculation. Their bios said as much. They were, if I recall correctly, software people from Silicon Valley who decided to publish a magazine.
  • Writing

    Writing Report, November 2018

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    Full disclosure: I’ve written this post after-the-fact. In December, 2018, but later than it looks like it was posted. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was a month ago’ stand in my way?

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    Disaster struck! Apple, in its wisdom, updated Safari, and they broke the extension that kills Facebook after a certain time. <shakes fist at sky> Why? Why?

    There were two days when I had to write a bunch of documentation at work, and it sapped my desire to write fun words, and so I counted that as my writing for the day. Not emails, mind you: actual documentation for QA so they could test my code and know what to expect. So I count it. It’s not creative (although QA might take an opposing view on that . . .), but it was words on ‘paper,’ and I counted it. So there.

    I did not do NaNoWriMo this year. I added the capability to my spreadsheet, because it was there and needed to be done (for certain values of ‘needed’). So in 2019 or 2020 (or going forward), if I decide to do NaNoWriMo, I have a mechanism in place to calculate, for each day of November, how many words per day I must achieve to meet the 50,000 word goal, and a switch to flip to turn NaNoWriMo Mode on or off. If it’s off, it just goes with the number of words required for the current level. And, even though I drove a grand total of sixteen hours over Thanksgiving weekend and visited friends and family in four different towns in Alabama, I by-God still managed to write some words every day. Yes, I did just pat myself on the back, because I freakin’ deserve it. :)

    As a note: I have completed NaNoWriMo a number of times, and don’t need to prove to myself that I can write 50,000 words in 30 days. I wrote 122,400+ words one November. I think I deserve a pass if I choose not to participate. :)

    For November, 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 27,142
      • Daily average words: 905
    • Time: 1443 minutes (24 hours, 3 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 48:06 min
    • Average words/hour: 1,128
    • Chain: 61 days
    • Level: 3, on the 10th
    • Quota: 350 words/day beginning on the 10th
  • Writing

    Writing Report, October 2018

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    Full disclosure: I’ve written this post very after-the-fact. In December, 2018. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was two months ago’ stand in my way?

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    I had a really hard time with several scenes in my novel, and several days of struggling before I realized I didn’t have to write sequentially and started skipping around. I wasn’t feeling it as much in October as in September, but I persevered. On several days when I couldn’t be bothered to write in the novel, I wrote something else. Anything else. Journal entries about why I was struggling to write, etc. But I kept at it every day, at least. And don’t think I didn’t count the words I wrote on two blog posts (one, two). ;)

    For October, 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 20,175
      • Daily average words: 651
    • Time: 1268 minutes (21 hours, 8 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 40:54 min
    • Average words/hour: 954
    • Chain: 31 days
    • Level: 2
    • Quota: 300 words/day
  • Writing

    Writing Report, September 2018

    Fountain Pen
    Writing

    Full disclosure: I’ve written this post very after-the-fact. In December, 2018. But I decided to take a cue from podcaster Chris Lester and sort of do a ‘writing update’ thing. And why let a little thing like ‘it was three months ago’ stand in my way?

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.

    I missed a day, and broke my chain. :( I had 43 days of straight writing — the most I’ve ever managed — and I visited my mother for her birthday at the end of the month and got sick, and then got home so late from that weekend that I was just exhausted and could literally not stay up long enough to write even 300 words unless it had been “All work and no play make Gary a dull boy” 30 times. Which was tempting, but no. :) I hated to break the chain, but it was unavoidable. So, I start over in October with a fresh new chain at 1, and it’ll take me a lot longer to get to level 3. Bummer, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it.

    I also hit a milestone! On the first, I realized that I’d free-written enough material to start organizing it into a bona-fide outline! So on the 1st through the 7th, I broke down my brain-dump into chunks and created a scene-by-scene rough outline of the entire novel, from start to finish. Very rough. :) On the 8th, I actually started writing the novel itself. Chapter 1, scene 1. And immediately had to start adding scenes to the outline! :)

    For September, 2018, my stats are

    • Words: 37,243
      • Daily average words: 1284
    • Time: 2048 minutes (34 hours, 8 minutes)
      • Daily average time: 70:37 min
    • Average words/hour: 1,091
    • Chain: 43 days
    • Level: 2 on the 16th
    • Quota: 300 words/day as of the 16th