Last morning at the writing retreat in Kaua’i. So hard to leave.
It’s been productive, though!
– I finished drafting a story (“For Ever and Ever”), revised it, sent it out (4000 words) — this is in the Jump Space universe
– I drafted another story (“River, Bath, Fountain, Flood”), which works as a tiny stand-alone (2300 words), but is mainly the prologue or backstory to the epic fantasy novel I’m thinking of writing — Game of Thrones in South Asia? There will be dragons.
Looking forward:
I’m hoping to write a little more of that on the plane, start getting into chapter one, with the hope that I can get some momentum going, so i won’t wait until I’m traveling again to write more of it; I really need to get back to morning writing AT HOME, and now that the weather is starting to improve in Chicago, hopefully soon the kids won’t need rides to school anymore, and I can have my uninterrupted early morning back. We’ll see.
If not, the next trip is ICFA (academic SF conference in Orlando) in three weeks, followed by spring break, so I should have some writing time then.
– I took a look at two other pieces in progress, both Jump Space. “Let Us Not Speak of Weddings” is around 8000 words, and while the overall arc is good, Benjamin Rosenbaum gave me a bunch of notes that I have to think about and implement — sadly, not just line edits, but some more substantive issues to consider, in order to get both the politics and the physics right. Maybe work on the plane.
– The other is my Patreon project, “The University of All Worlds,” a university murder mystery. I feel very guilty that I’m so behind on sending sections out to Patreon, so I’m pretty determined to try to finish it off soon, maybe this week. I think it’ll end up around 25 – 30K, which is an awkward length for magazines and print (and some of the editors wouldn’t want something that had been out on Patreon), but just fine for e-books. So once it’s out to Patreon, I think this may be the start of me starting to release some of my Jump Space stories as e-books. Connor Nevitt, Stephanie Bailey adding this to the things to discuss.
I have about two more hours here (with packing), so I’m going to look at one more piece — I have various food essays I started and never finished, and at least one is fairly close to done, I think, “Uppuma Chicken”. So maybe I can knock that off?
When it’s done, I have to research markets — I don’t actually have a list of where to send such things. Who carries food essays? Are you a foodie who reads that kind of thing? Help me generate a list, please!
My last goals for this trip are:
– keep transferring things into my physical planner, see if it helps
– start sending out my SF novel to agents again. I keep stopping and starting. Need to be consistent and actually get it out the door on a regular basis. Send it to ten agents a week, instead of sending it to one agent and then waiting six months in silence.
They can’t agree to represent it if they don’t see it. (Connor, I want to put this on your task list too. I just have too much emotional whateverness about it, and I think outsourcing the e-mailing and tracking may just be worth doing, to get it actually done.)
