Well, it’s that time of the week again. You all saw the title, you know what’s going on here…so let’s hop to it.
As expected, work this week has mostly centred around The 2nd Realm. I’ve managed to get into a little bit more of a groove this week, although it’s still sort of been happening in fits and spurts. It doesn’t help that I’ve got school to focus on, too, and these past few weeks have seen my ‘to do’ list really start to grow. With a bit more than a week to go before my Christmas vacation starts, I’ve been having trouble staying motivated: once I get in the groove, I’m usually able to pump out between two and three thousand words a day, but getting into that groove in the first place has been tough. There’s also been some stress in my academic and personal lives; that could also be slowing me down a tad. Maybe I need to take a couple weeks to decompress before coming back to finish off the first draft of The 2nd Realm (not to mention the Nightmares Inc. ending and the short stories I’ve started on).
Once I am finally through with those, though, the question will be (as it always is): what next? Well, in terms of fresh copy, there’re a few ideas that’ve been anxious to wrestle their way out of me for a while now. One of these is the first in what’ll be a fantasy series (not sure how many books yet), tentatively titled Chronicles of Usi. With Chronicles of Usi, I plan to write the first book so that it could work either as a standalone novel or the first in a series. That way, if it eventually gets published but turns out to be a commercial dud, I can just shelve the series and keep it a standalone. I don’t yet have a clear vision for the rest of the series anyway: what’s really clear in my mind, and what’s wrestling to escape the dusty corners of my mind, is the story of book one…and so that’s what I hope to start on in January, or at the very latest February.
Of course, there’ll also be the Kosan rewrite. I’m a bit hesitant to go back to Kosan, truth be told: as I said in my original update on what I’ve been working on, among all my books, finished, half-finished and imagined, Kosan was kind of my baby. I was high on the book’s potential…a little too high, as my experience hiring that professional editor last year showed. But I’m at the point now (over 9 months after I got the editor’s letter…we writers can be fragile creatures sometimes) where I can look at the story a bit more dispassionately, decide what works and what doesn’t, and hopefully rework it into something better. I’ve already rewritten a few scenes here and there, but getting into the meat of it…it’ll be an interesting process.
I also got another magazine rejection this week: this is the fourth I’ve gotten since I started shopping around my short fiction again. Interestingly, three of those four rejections have been for the same story: a little yarn called Crawl Spaces. I originally wrote this one back in 2018, but never really did anything with it until recently, when I decided to start sending off short stories again. Reading it again, with relatively fresh eyes, I still thought it had merit: I tweaked the ending a little and brushed up some of the language, but overall I felt the story was strong enough to send off to publications.
As of now, though, no one’s been biting on this one…and it’s a story that’s a little long for a short story and a little tough to categorize genre-wise, which is unfortunate for a couple reasons. First, literary magazines tend to want stories between 500 and 5000 words in length, with 1000-3000 being the most common, in my experience. Crawl Spaces, meanwhile, is just under 6000, which instantly puts it over the word limit for a lot of publications. Second, the story is…well, I don’t even really know how to describe it in terms of genre. Horror/suspense/psychological/thriller, maybe? It’s a little like Join, actually: both deal with a character going crazy, although in different ways, and with very different endings.
This is a problem because the “genre” magazines (a.k.a. the sci-fi mags, the fantasy mags, the relatively few horror mags that still exist) generally want you to, well…stick to one genre. And of the ones that are open to a bit of genre blending, a bunch of them aren’t open to stories as long as Crawl Spaces. That kind of limits how many different magazines I can send Crawl Spaces around to: there are maybe two or three left that I know of that I could try, but if those ones reject it, too, I’m not sure what this story’s fate will be. I’ve played with the idea of making it a “website exclusive” – a.k.a. just put it up on my site if no one else wants it – but that feels a bit cheap, and a little too close to self-publishing for my comfort (at some point in the future, I will go into more detail on why I almost certainly will never self-publish anything. Maybe not soon, but at some point).
Thankfully, one of the other stories I’ve been shopping, Endure, has neither of these problems. Endure is quite clearly a science fiction story: thus, I’ve been shopping it around to the science fiction magazines. And Endure is a lot shorter than Crawl Spaces is: it’s only about 2700 words, which is right in the goldilocks zone for length. That gives me a lot more options in terms of sending Endure around…but who knows? Maybe it’ll get rejected by all possible options too. And maybe once it does, I’ll just put it up on the website. It almost guarantees that barely anyone will read it, but then again, it’d be a shame for it to just sit on my computer unread for all eternity.
Well, that’s pretty much all I’ve got for you this week. Once I finally get that Nightmares Inc. ending done, then get some peer readers to look at it and do another pass myself, I might hire a pro editor again to look at that one. Right now, I feel like Nightmares Inc. is the closest out of all my books to being in a publishable state…but we shall see. First I need to finish that ending. And I need to save some money. Editors aren’t cheap, and grad students aren’t rich!
Anyway, I’ll see you all next time. Have fun, stay safe, and keep reading.
