In the beginning, there was the Outline. Or there will be. (Will have been?) Having more or less run out of usable ideas for short fiction for the moment, I’m diving back into the project I had earlier: expanding Where Do They Bury the Survivors? to novel length. I approach with some trepidation, as the […]
Just got back a rejection for A Stab in the Dark. I wonder at what point F&SF’s form rejections started using the word “story” instead of “tale”. Ah well, into the filing cabinet it goes. Haven’t decided yet about its next stop. Its 7,000 word length is a little bit of a handicap for some […]
After finishing A Stab in the Dark, I decided to revisit the novella that kicked off my mystery-writing spree, Where Do They Bury the Survivors? If you missed it (easy to do, as it hasn’t been accepted anywhere for publication) it’s a locked-room murder mystery that takes place on a space station in interstellar space. […]
Two rejections in one day. That’s a bad thing, but also a good thing.
I finished up the most recent short story yesterday afternoon. I trimmed a few scenes, but made up for it by adding a whole other one (I’ll be curious if anyone coming back to this post can figure out which scene was added). It’s a good piece, one of the better mysteries-per-se that I’ve written. […]
I finished up a rough draft of my work-in-progress. I wound up wrapping it up at around 6300 words, though I may expand it a bit on the next draft. I added a scene looking for a particular piece of evidence, and discovered that the character addition from earlier shortened that scene considerably. Now comes […]
Just finished up a good bit of writing: Just shy of a thousand words, net, on the current mystery story, A Stab in the Dark, after going back and making some revisions based on my notes from the plane. Adding a character (now Sgt. Van Rijn) was very much the right thing to do, the […]
Having now finished a third draft of the fantasy piece I wrote the other day, based on feedback from friends and from the Absolute Write forums, it’s time to find a home for this little beast.
I typed up the story that I wrote on the plane and did some relatively light editing: the result is a fairly brisk 1400-word short story, straddling the line between flash fiction and a very short story. I let a few friends have a look at it, and the results so far have been similar […]
Well, that was interesting. Thanks to the thunderstorms, I spent far too much time in an airport yesterday, and didn’t get home until midnight. But the end result was more work on that piece of flash fiction (which may no longer be flash, I’ll have to type it up and word-count) and managed to overcome […]
