Helpful Critiques

The Underground Writers has had their first critiquing session. This was something that we all felt was missing from the Sudbury Hypergraphic Society, so we made sure to put concrete deadlines for something to be submitted to the group for critiquing. I believe I mentioned in one of my previous posts that I had rushes to finish a draft of "Bloodspurt" for this particular session. Well, the word has come back from the group. They were entertained, always a good sign, but they could tell that it was definitely a rough draft. It was obvious where I started rushing to the ending, and numerous small comments came up about different parts and people's preferences.

Overall, I was pretty impressed actually. I knew there were a lot of problems with the piece, but I would have missed about half of what they mentioned. The pieces I critiqued were all pretty well polished in comparison with my draft, so I feel really bad about hogging so many useful comments. Everyone received their fair share though. A piece here, a transition there, some dialog, some character... There was a little for everyone to work on, and from what I'm hearing, most can hardly wait to do it again.

I almost have my piece ready for the next deadline. "Tactical Medics" took a slightly different route from the one I had originally anticipated, but I am very impressed with what I've managed to crank out this time. It feels a lot more polished, and pending a quick read-through by a regular reader, I'm pretty confident this piece will be a little better for the group to scrape through. I have the third draft sitting in front of me, and it's been chewed down to 4,027 words from 4,183. I had to add a couple of paragraphs to make the ending a little more foreshadowed, and to give the characters a little more character. I may need to look at their dialog a little more to differentiate between the two primary characters, but I'm not overly concerned. Gonna look at that when I move from third to fourth draft.

Rejections are In

So, the big news. Finally got a response out of Poetry Magazine. It was a nice little rejection letter. So there are now four poems that need to move out to the next possible location. Not quite sure where to send them next, but I think "Arrogance" would kinda work in Aasimov's Science Fiction, "Tinted Mirror" would work well in Necrology, and the other two, "Invisible Eris" and "Two Days", may not quite work anywhere.

Some may take rejection as defeat. I take it as a necessary evil. If things weren't rejected, we'd never be able to get non-serious writers to pursue something else. You gotta have a tough skin to write. That's not a secret. I know that I've had some poetry published in the past, and I know that it's been a while since I wrote poetry with much commitment. I expect to have a lot of places reject my work before anything is accepted. A few successes here and there couldn't hurt any though.

Since I was rejected, I've finished the first draft of a new short story, "Tactical Medics", and am about six drafts through a fresh poem, "Ignorance." The short story, is a bit of a fun slap in the face. I'm pretty excited about the first draft, but I won't be getting too far ahead of myself. I want to give it a couple good thick edits before turning it over to the Underground Writers on October 1st. That'll give me feedback for October 15th, and I can clean it up and maybe submit it somewhere (On Spec ?) for November 1st. I'm saving "Ignorance" for my next set of 4 poems to ship out to Poetry Magazine, which I also hope to be able to do on November 1st.

Speaking of work in progress. The Underground Writers currently has "Bloodspurt" in their hands, and I'm sure they'll be ripping it up good. I've already read through a few of the pieces that I need to have done for Thursday. One of them is absolutely fantastic, the others are pretty good starts of which I hope to read more. When I get "Bloodspurt" back, I'll know how much time I should really be editing that piece. I'm sure its a lot. With a bit of luck, I should be able to send it out for the beginning of October, but that may be optimistic given the piece itself.

Dug up a couple of fantasy pieces I started a couple years ago, and I think with some work, I can finish them and get them sent out somewhere. I'm betting on Tales of the Talisman for one of them, but figure it won't be going out until the new year. With National Novel Writing Month sitting on the horizon, I won't be putting words down on anything but Hedged in November. Still have some time this month I suppose.

Anyhow, enough writing in the form of procrastination. I need to turn my writing to one of my WIPs. Good luck everyone!

On Words and Working

Always busy with this business. I've done a lot in the past month since I last posted here. I haven't written nearly as much as I had hoped in the past while, but that's because I've been doing a lot of other work in other areas. Trying to get things running smoothly all around can take up a lot of time, but now that things seem to be hammered out, I think I'll be able to crank-up my word count, tune up the ticker, and get myself on the healthy track.

I managed to finish the first full draft of "Bloodspurt" (4189 words) on September 1st. I knew while writing it that it wasn't quite turning out the way that I wanted it to, but that may be mid-project dislike and boredom, the bane of writers across the world. It seems whenever you hit the mid-point of a project, other ideas start battering at you and you find it difficult to keep going, and then, you have to decide whether the ending you originally thought up will still work with the piece and things fall apart. I managed to hammer my way through it so that I could call the first, unedited draft finished. I had a very concrete deadline, and I'm glad that this was provided for me, though I'm sure about half my story is going to get itself ripped to shreds.

I have my writing group to thank for the concrete deadline. The Underground Writers decided about midway through August that we needed to have deadlines and that we needed to critique in order to help each other grow as writers. I know that I have a lot of room for growth, so I was very eager to get some stuff out. We have a 1st of the month deadline for pieces, which means that we essentially have to complete one piece, or at least 5k words every month. That may not seem like many words, but in some cases, that could be a huge difference, and even if the pieces being sent out never get seen beyond the group, it's still a good way for us to learn from each other.

Of course, "Bloodspurt" wasn't the only piece I worked on over the past month. I've also managed a number of writing exercises that I may be able to make use of in other pieces, a short science fiction song, and a handful of words for my novel, The Fall of Order. Not nearly as far along as I had hoped, but it's something. I need to get the first draft fully wrapped up by the end of October so I can step into NaNo 2009 fresh.

Still no word from Poetry Magazine about getting published. So I'll have to wait a bit longer on that front. I'm hoping to sit down sometime this labour day weekend and scribble out five or six decent poems to send them after the current batch is accepted/rejected. If rejected, I'll cycle the current batch to the next publisher on the list and work my way from there. I know two of the four can definitely be picked up, the other two probably can as well. I have high hopes.