Hello, dreamers. I had another busy week. It’s been snowing to beat the band here recently, and I’m confident this past week I saw the worst winter storm I’ve experienced since moving to Cincinnati in 2003. But on the bright side, blizzards make for great writing weather. So I had a productive week, and I’m looking forward to another one. That said, here’s what I’ll be working on this week:

Querying Pioneers

After spending most of the week away from the story, I’ve begun the final editing pass on Pioneers. I’ll likely be targeting my work this time around, focusing mainly on passages I’ve made significant changes to, which will make the work much easier.

Over the weekend, I knocked off the hardest part: formatting. Over the years, one of the many things I’ve learned a lot about in writing is formatting. Unfortunately, I knew a lot less about it when I first wrote Pioneers, which meant the entire novel was a mess. Adjusting the formatting was without a doubt the most laborious, most tedious, and least fun part of this process. And I’m glad to be done with it.

From there I have only a couple more minor tweaks I expect to make. Part of me is tempted, after the rapid progress I’ve made in writing over the past year, to really dig in and start making wild changes. But I keep telling myself I can still do that at some point if querying drags on for a while.

This week, I plan to finish editing, and then begin my query letter. I’ve been listening to “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing” again lately, and I feel more and more confident in my ability to craft a successful query letter. I’ll be starting this evening, with a simple three-paragraph summary. The way I see it, if I can succinctly summarize the story in just three paragraphs, I’ll be ready to write a good letter. Wish me luck.

Short Fiction

Last week, I mentioned my annual review of the previous year’s sketches. This week, I’m beginning what used to be another annual activity: a comprehensive audit of outstanding writing projects.

It’s a popular joke in writing circles that you’re not really a writer unless you have at least twenty unfinished projects lying around. I try hard to avoid that, but I like to think I break the mold in that I seldom leave a project unfinished. I may take a while (my novella The Envoy was written in fits spanning nearly five years, though most of the story was written over the course of about two weeks). But even if it takes years, I finish what I start.

As I’ve said, I typically devote the first three months of the year to short fiction, as most of my novel work is editing at that point. And for years after I began writing, I’d take the opportunity in early January to sift through my outstanding short fiction projects and see if there was anything I could bite on (that was actually how I ended up completing The Envoy). Over the past few years, however, I’d gotten away from the practice.

This year, I’m finally back at it. I’ve chosen to resume my annual audit in part due to the leap forward my writing took last year. Prishelets was a watershed story for me: something that represented such a bold change in direction that it became a line of demarcation. The kind of story that creates a “before” and “after” in my work. Over the past month, I’ve found myself growing critical of work I’d completed in just the past two years.

As such, I’ve come to view at least some of my outstanding projects as wholly irredeemable. I couldn’t possibly hope to just pick up these stories where I left off; I’d have to start from scratch. With most of them, frankly I have little interest in doing so. I’d prefer to focus on more recent story ideas that better suit my current style.

At least a few of these stories will probably end up packed into my trunk, allowing me to pick them up and rewrite at some point in the future if I so choose. But most of them will just end up in the bin. It’s gotten to the point where I’m not even interested in keeping them around for posterity.

That serves as a good segue into my current work. I have, in fact, continued writing daily, and in addition to my sketches I managed to complete another short story last night. Casual Brutality follows an investigator on the trail of a crew of space pirates. The story explores the heartless nature of crime in space, where the hostile nature of life in the vacuum leads to callous decisions. The main character struggles with a mounting sense of detachment from the victims of the crimes he’s investigating, and he begins to wonder if he’s losing his own humanity.

For the time being, I’ve adopted what I’m calling a “write-first” approach to short fiction. Rather than writing a story, then editing it, then formatting, then submitting it before moving on, I plan to move right into the next story after typing “The End”. With college football season over, I’ll likely begin devoting Saturdays to editing for the time being. As my short stories are typically no longer than two or three chapters of one of my novels, I’m usually able to fully edit in a single day. And I think giving myself more time away from stories will facilitate the editing process.

Right now, I’m not sure what I’ll be writing this evening. I have plenty of possibilities, and I may simply flip through a few story projects and start writing whatever jumps out at me. It feels good to have possibilities.

New Content

This week, I’ll be making a “Dear Sir or Madam” post about the formatting process for manuscripts, which I promise won’t be as dull as it sounds (hopefully). And with Facula being released a week from Saturday, look for a new “Self-Pub” Sunday announcing this next installment of When We Left Earth, along with a book sale leading up to the release. Until then, dare to dream. – MK