Words by Frances Rowat
My writing. This is distinct from the “written word” tag, which covers writing both mine and others, and the “Stories, Packaged and Sold” category, which covers the stories of others.
I am glad (very glad!) to say that I’ve sold a story to Liminal Stories, and “Late Night at the Low Road Diner” will be appearing in their August issue.
Liminal Stories publishes absolutely lovely work, by the way, all of which is online, and I highly recommend going to check it out.
I had one story come out this year; “Thou Unnecessary Letter”, which was started in one of Cat Rambo’s classes and published in the Alliteration Ink anthology No Shit, There I Was…. One of the slush jackalopes for the anthology referred to it as “magical alphabet noir”, and I can’t think of a better summary.
I submitted stories 51 times in 2017, and got 46 rejections (43 were from 2017 submissions, and 3 were from submissions made in 2016). I also withdrew two stories (one from a 2017 submission, and one from a 2016 one).
At the end of the year, I had seven stories out. Last year I only managed 36 submissions, and this year I was aiming for 50; next year I’m going to try for 70.
Here’s hoping 2018 is a little gentler all around.
This is fairly belated, in part because as soon as I won NaNoWriMo, I collapsed under a gentle heap of unanswered emails and overdue to-do items.
That said, I did win NaNoWriMo. Hit 50,084 words on November 26th, and wrote another 483 on the 30th for a grand total of 50,567 words.
I’m both saddened by how much other things seemed to pile up, and encouraged by how relatively easy it was. (Also, no joke: the light of my life helped with that a lot.) It wasn’t very easy, but it wasn’t like pulling out my own teeth, the way I’d been worried it would be. It was at least interesting to me.
(This isn’t to say that I think that everything I wrote was good, and I would like to thank Story Hospital for reminding me that it didn’t have to be, and Captain Awkward for the incredibly useful coping technique of responding to an internal editor saying “this sucks, no-one will care” with “you’re right, no-one will care, guess I’m writing it anyway.”)
If I just didn’t need to sleep, or work, I could get so much more done. Failing that, I’m looking at what’s possible in terms of carving an extra couple of hours out of each day.
The title of this post was actually a typo, but I’ve decided I like it. Nice combination of “trucking” and “trickling”, which is what writing has started to feel like.
I’m just over 36,000 words (36,120! 13,880 left!), and I’m getting pretty tired. I’ve also learned that I need breaks; I can write every day for a solid week, but after that, there is going to be a day when my brain rebels, shuts down, and insists on just eating someone else’s words for a while.
(This might be different if I wasn’t also working full-time. I do get that. However, I do not have “November” amounts of vacation time, so that is a moot point. Relatedly, I am also very behind on all my reading and watching television.)
I’ve hit the point where I’m actually not sure what I have left to write, so I’m probably going to take the day and plot out what I already have (including some text from before November, because this novel has been hanging around for a long time), what order everything should be in, and what I need to still get down.
Ten days left, I should be able to manage 1,388 words a day. Wish me luck.
I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year (although honestly I’m thinking of cutting down my word goal–40,000 instead of 50,000, maybe), and today I had a day off. I got left in a coffee shop, handwrote for a couple of hours, came home and typed before a nap, wrote a little after dinner, and then managed to get into a 1h1k sprint.
I wrote 4,412 words today. That is not my personal best, I’m sure, but it’s probably my second-best ever.
(Clearly all I need to do is win the lottery, become utterly self-sufficient, quit my job, and be free to spend hours a day writing while still having time to, you know, walk and maintain social relationships and cook dinner and the like. Simple! Not easy, just simple.)
Back to work tomorrow. The weather has decided that it definitely wants to be November–chilly, rainy, and grey. No snow yet, though.
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.
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.
May was… long. I will speak no more of it than I already have.
The latest On Spec Magazine has been published, and contains my short story “Gannet Girl”; you can also get an electronic version of the issue here.
Gannets do not love humans, but they can see eye to eye with them. It’s a matter of some import.
(And in other news, the No Shit, There I Was… anthology funded, and I signed the contract and received payment; backers will get their copies, and then the book’ll be available to the general public.)
I have a short story that’ll be appearing in the No Shit, There I Was… anthology from Alliteration Ink! The anthology theme is pretty straightforward; you could submit any specfic story, as long as it started with those five magic words. It’s currently being funded on Kickstarter; an ecopy of the anthology is $5, although nearly as many people are going for the trade[1].
Alex Acks is doing a daily discussion of the stories over on his blog while the Kickstarter is running, and today he wrote about mine; you can read what he had to say here, and I am sharing this because I am… well, gleeful and flattered and so pleased that apparently my story did what I wanted it to do!
(The discussions are compiled under the no shit anthology tag, and make for excellent reading, joint and severally.)
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[1] Omigod more of my words are going to be in print.
Yesterday, my contributors copies of The Weird Wild West came in. (They should have come sooner, but apparently there was some trouble, for which I suspect I should blame Canada Post; in any case, I would like to say that everyone at eSpec Books was absolutely lovely to deal with, and thank them all.)
I’m in a book. I’m in a book with an ISBN, and people said nice things about my story. One of the editors had a lovely reaction to it, and Amazing Stories called it a strong start to the anthology, and overall I am hugely pleased.
And the art is beautiful. I can’t take a good picture of any of the full-page pieces (and I suspect that might not be cool, in any case), but look at my extremely clumsy picture of that beautiful story header. Look. <3
Anyway, it’s on Amazon; you can get it starting at $5 for the ebook, or in trade paperback. And there’s a lovely page at the front with all the author’s names, and space for signatures; I’m planning to take one of my copies to cons, and get as many as I can.
