Author: Frances K R

Cheerful optimism (and a chance at free magazines)

Clarion West is a non-profit literary organization in Seattle; it runs both a six-week workshop for writers in the summer, and one-day workshops for writers throughout the year.

They also do a yearly fundraiser to help keep the workshop going, which is the six-week Clarion West Write-a-thon. This year I’ve signed up for it; I’m aiming to write a thousand words a week on my novel for six weeks, and hoping to help raise even a little to help keep the workshop going.

With regards to those free magazines:

I have print copies of the issues in which two of my stories appeared; ‘Palimpsest’ from the second issue of The Sockdolager, and ‘The Gannet Girl’ from issue 102 of On Spec. I’ll draw two names from the people who sponsor me; the first name gets their pick of magazine, and the second name gets the other one. I’ll need a mailing address, but I can send them to anywhere that Canada Post delivers, and I will cover postage.

If you’d like to sponsor me, here’s my page for the Write-a-thon; if you’d like to look at the other authors who are working on it, there’s a full list (137 as of this writing!) available here.

Any sponsorship helps, honestly, and so does passing word along to other people who might be interested. And hey– a chance at free magazines, with stories by me and many other brilliant authors!

Heading into summer.

May was a busy month. In addition to a couple of personal milestones and a chance to meet local writers in person (kind of terrifying, everyone was absolutely lovely), I submitted eight stories and got six rejections (with the one that just came in earlier today, I’ve hit my third centiBrad for the year!), cleared out yet more old books, and started back into physio.

I meant to post something. I did.

Good intentions, and all that.

The next couple of months are going to be interesting. There are two writing/commitment things I’m looking at–all of which would be interesting, some of which I worry would be overwhelming–and I’m thinking very carefully about what I can realistically commit to. (And after the next two months are over, there’s WorldCon in Helsinki, which if it’s anything like the last ones I’ve attended will both be a wonderful experience and a very exhausting one.) I’m hoping to get a plan together this weekend and go from there.

Onwards!

 

Raw material and shelf space.

Sadly, I’ve written 27,701 words this month. I say “sadly” because I was aiming for 30,000, but I did something fairly painful to my hand yesterday evening so I’m not making that goal.

I also managed to read ten magazines (eight came in, which is a pretty heavy month for me; most months it’s less), so I’m at least a lot more on top of short stories this year than I was at the start of the year. (I’m also trying to be more organized about noting down things that I might want to keep in mind for Hugo nominations for next year, which has caused me to notice that I haven’t exactly read a lot of 2017 novels yet.)

I’ve also slacked fairly badly on story submissions, and really need to catch up on that. Overall, though, I’m pretty happy with the month; I just need to spend more of May that is usual focussing on revising writing than I usually do. Here’shoping the transition goes smoothly.

Words and dust

I used to sew. And for years I’ve had a subscription to Threads, which I find to be a lovely magazine (perfect-bound, too!).

For a lot of years. My mom got a subscription when it started up, you see, and I got one when I moved out, and… Oh dear. I might actually have, give or take, two decades worth of the magazine, here.

On paper.

I’m ballparking that at about 12,000 pages, and no, there is not an extra zero in there.

I mentioned that I used to sew, right?

So I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that there is actually no-one who wants these things (no, libraries don’t usually take old magazines), and I have no use for them, and they are taking up a kind of ridiculous amount of shelf-space, and…

And I feel guilty for not having kept up with them. I feel guilty for not still liking them, as if I owe it to the person I was a decade ago to not change. I feel guilty for not being able to go through them and use them up to produce a brilliant and trenchant collage that is both a commentary on modern society and a funny and uplifting story (although with 12,000 pages, quite frankly, I am not sure where the hell such a collage could be stored and also I’m now imagining glue in all the cat fur help this is out of control).

But the magazines are meant to be something I enjoy. If they’re making me feel unhappy and vaguely anxious, they are defective and the situation needs to be corrected. I think I’ve finally managed to get through the guilt and figure this out, and that’s a good feeling.

(I’d still love it if sometime in the future magazines became edible. Then they would be easy and economical to dispose of, instead of quite this fraught.)

Managing the flood of words.

I’ve finished six books so far this month (bringing me to twenty-six for the year), and I may finish another one tonight. That said, March was the month where… hang on, counting up titles and being slightly embarrassed…

March was the month where eight e-magazines dropped into my inbox. Eight. Also two print magazines came by mail, so I’m going to call it… thirty-five stories, probably.

Most months don’t have quite so many magazines, but March was something of a perfect storm. I’m thinking it’s really time to get through some of them. It’s hard, because most of them are e-magazines and I don’t tend to actually parse that those are piling up, so they get out of hand a little more easily.

So I think that, in addition to Camp NaNoWriMo, April is going to be the month where I put down the books and focus on my magazines for a bit. It’ll feel a bit strange because those aren’t tracked in Goodreads, but by the end of April I should still be ahead of the curve (I’m only aiming to read 65 books this year) and the stack of stuff on my ereader and end table will be down a bit.

Dusting off

It’s been a long couple of months. The physiotherapy has helped a lot–in addition to being able to type normally, I’m no longer on 4.5 times the recommended OTC daily dose of naproxen–but things have been piling up a bit and I’m still playing catch-up a little.

I’ve begun knitting again. That’s lovely.

I’ve been reading a fair bit; I’m actually at 23 books for the year so far (although two of those are standalone short stories and five are graphic novels, which are usually pretty quick reads), plus a few magazines.

I’ve gotten a new laptop and a new phone, since the old ones respectively were in the process of slowly failing and died on me completely, and while the new ones are pretty nice I’m still adjusting to the new layouts a bit.

I’ve realized that I have only two stories out, and this means that I actually have eleven works which need to get a quick check to see if it’s been a mistake to be sending them out and then get back out there. Hopefully most of them are in good shape.

There’s more, but I’m trying to focus on the positive, and keep moving.

Sudden brief update, and hand pain

The recent quiet has been due to a lot of things, most recently a lot of things that ended up developing into a tendonitis flare-up like I haven’t had since late 2014.

This one wasn’t quite as bad as that one–I was unable to use my right hand for typing for a few days, but I recognized what was happening and got an appointment with a physiotherapist. I am sure I have bored everyone I have been dealing with with how hard my life has been while I’ve been unable or unpermitted to type.

(On the flip side, my phone’s touchscreen can be navigated with nose-bumps, and I have learned that the text-to-speech recognition on my phone can recognize and render both “:-)” and “kryptonian”. However, it didn’t appear to know “biphobic”. Such are the discoveries we make when discussing modern fiction in this brave new world of 2017.)

I was able to start writing again in short bursts this weekend–I am actually composing this in one of my seven-minute allowed keyboard periods–and it is such a relief to get back. Knowing that a timer is counting down focuses the mind wonderfully, although it does make editing fairly difficult.

Counting ink, 2016.

2016 was a year where I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped. Still, I did not do nothing, and I did get two short stories published:

“The Gannet Girl”, in the May issue 102 of On Spec magazine; my fairy tale of sea witches and social expectations, and gannets which do not love but may be loyal.

“Playing Prometheus“, in the November 18 issue of Persistent Visions; my time travel story. I’m not sure I have it in me to write another, but I am so very pleased I wrote this one.

I have another story which was accepted this year and will be published in 2017; that’s my magical alphabet noir story, which is apparently a pretty nifty concept.

I submitted stories 36 times in 2016, and got 36 rejections (33 were from 2016 submissions, and 3 were from submissions made in 2015). I also got two acceptances.

I’ve got four stories out at the moment. I’m hoping to manage a lot closer to seventy submissions next year; I was aiming for it this year and fell woefully short.

 

Happy New Year! See you on the other side.

Annoyed and grumpy.

To be clear that’s “being the subject of targeted annoyance” rather than “being in a free-floating annoyed state”. Because apparently there is at least one guy in the complex where I work who takes the sight of a woman walking down the hall and being engaged in something on her phone as a reason to pretend he’s going to run into her.

Not even joking. Direct quote: “I was just bugging you. Acting like we were going to run into each other. Because you were on your phone.”

Yes, sir. Yes, I was on my phone. And you successfully interrupted what I was doing, motivated by seeing that I was on my phone. For your next trick, perhaps you will interrupt someone who is not available to pay attention to you in a completely different way.

I am mostly over the irritation about this, but it feels like the week is shaping up to be a long week and this didn’t really help.

Changing times

My short story “Playing Prometheus” has been published at Persistent Visions! It can be read online here. And the art for it is absolutely gorgeous; I am deeply grateful to Dana Martin.

(Please note: there is a content warning at the top of the story.)

I’ve noticed that a lot of time travel stories suggest that good results only come of preserving the past, or of making changes by accident. “Playing Prometheus” is my attempt to engage with that.

I hope you enjoy it; I’ve done my best.