Check-in, Re: Goals

  by  futileboy 

As you may be able to tell from the graphic I’ve chosen for this post, my first submission of “Legal Aliens” has been rejected. No problem. It will be sent back out — better than it was, because it’s been edited — to another market. Probably tomorrow.

I have met all of my goals for the Codex Weekend Warrior contest. I’ve submitted three new 750-word flash stories. The contest is still on, and I don’t want to blow my Nom de Guerre by revealing the names or even exactly how I’ve done, but I will say this: I’m scoring consistently as far as my rating out of ten. All three are within .4 of each other. Voting’s not complete for round three, so that could easily change before round three is done by 9 pm tomorrow.

I did not meet my second submission deadline. The story simply wasn’t ready (see below), and rather than send out something that I know will be rejected, I’d rather send out my best effort. It will be ready for sending out by Monday, so I’ll just have to hustle to get the one after that ready in only one week.

My second story is one I’ve been working on for a long time. It’s a humorous fairy tale noir story I’m tentatively calling “The Case of the Playboy Prince.” I wrote myself into a corner sometime back before Viable Paradise and it simply had no ending. It languished in Scrivener waiting for inspiration. Which finally hit one morning about a week ago in the shower. I hacked out about 3000 words, wrote 2400 new ones, and it stands at 11,300+ words. Which is maybe a bit long for the market, but . . . there’s a scene at the front I can cut, distribute some of the exposition to later scenes, and maybe get it down below 10,000 words. We’ll see.

I’ve begun to work on revamping an older novella (“The Surrogate”) that I didn’t know how to end (do you sense a pattern?) as a candidate for my Q1 Writers of the Future submission. It can be as many as 17,000 words. Of course, I have selected to revamp a story that came out to 23,000+ words the first time through, so I foresee more gutting in my future. :)

Anyway, there is progress. I’m gonna hang on to that image up there, just in case. And I’m going to optimistically look for one that says “Accepted” on it.