Week of 17 July to 23 July
Not for lack of time, but for lack of routine was I not very productive, writing-wise, this week. I finished revisions on neither Trust but Verify nor Rest for the Weary, which were my major writing goals for the week. While I made a good start on Drive On, it isn’t enough to compensate for not completing those revisions like I intended. A project for next week, I suppose.
In truth, my writing this week was…scattered. I did a little work – a few hundred words here, a thousand words there – on a lot of assorted stories, without making substantial progress on any of them. That tendency is exactly why I need a deadline system like I have for Blood Magic releases in order to keep me focused on writing and finishing one story at a time. Otherwise, I end up writing a bit of half a dozen different tales, like I did this week. Yes, they are intriguing stories, and I’d like to think eventually I will finish most of them, but that won’t happen if I never focus on just one at a time.
I also filled a lot of my writing time this week with market research, looking up contests and magazines for short fiction of various calibers. After taking my writing seriously for almost a decade, you might be surprised that I’ve never submitted any of my writing to any contests or magazines. Well, there was that contest in elementary school, but that doesn’t count. Anyway, my excuse is always that I don’t have stories suitable to fit the word counts or desired contents, or maybe I just lack confidence; however, I am resolved to submit to at least one contest or magazine by the end of the year, and I will definitely be posting about that process here on the site.
Another observation from this week: I’m really bad at short fiction. One of the magazines I investigated, Elegant Literature, has a word count limit of 2000 words, and a monthly writing prompt at which I tried my hand. By the time I finished exposition and got around to introducing the main conflict, I was at seventeen hundred words. Oops. So that’s something at which to work, as well.
But enough of me updating you on what I didn’t do this week; hopefully, next week’s update will be more substantial. Next week holds a Blood Magic extra, a review for Bernoulli’s Fallacy, which I consider a must-read book for anyone who interacts with statistics (meaning everyone), and the release of A Matter of Facts. All of that as we close in on the end of July. Be sure to follow the site to keep up to date on the latest IGC Publishing news. I’ll be back next week with another weekly writing update.
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