Poor Resolution
Ah, the New Year, that time when a young man’s fancy turns to belaboring his failures and swearing to God Almighty that he’ll do better if you let him live another year. By the way, this post will be all about me and not a rant on anything entertaining, so if you don’t like that, well, I’m still relatively convinced all my readers are fictional entities and this blog amounts to me sitting on a stage in a dark room talking to myself, so I’m not too worried about it. I don’t believe in you! But in case you’re real, and don’t like it, screw you. I don’t blog for you. I blog for posterity.First, the recap: I made three big resolutions, one that was really out of my control, and two which I could achieve (oh, and the perennial favorite of “get in shape,” which gets the perennial response of “I don’t want to talk about it.”) Needless to say, the one I had no control over was achieved. huzzah! The ones within my control, the not-so-much.
My first resolution was to make a professional-level paying sale of short fiction. This I did, when Baen’s Universe (god bless their charitable souls) bought my short story Spamdemonium in, I don’t know, Octoberish (wedged between the months of Septomething and Notquitember). I say again: huzzah! Spamdemonium will/should/might be out in the June 2k8 issue. I’ll keep you posted.
Second resolution: to write a marketable story every month. Abysmal failure. In 2007, my unbelievably crappy tally is a whopping 2 marketable stories, 3 completed stories that might some day be marketable if I ever get off my ass and edit them which is not bloody likely at the current moment, and approximately 6 jillion half-finished little bleeders that might be stories someday. Wow. Oh yeah, and something like 12 Story Game stories, ranging from short and mediocre to considerably longer and pretty-darn-good-if-I-do-say-so-myself-which-I-do-cause-ain’t-no-one-else-here-okay-this-is-seriously-getting-old-quit-it. So technically, si! on the getting a story done every month, N'ole! on the getting with the marketability up in that piece.
Third resolution: Start that dern-bern-novel you’re always not talking about. First of all, let me say, I am writing this on December 28, and I have a good mind to make it a hootenanny of a weekend and get one going. So there. Second of all, I qualify this as a technical success: I spent about a month working on background and preliminary writings for what I expected to be a stirring scifi epic for the ages, only to find that it was. When written by Roger Zelazny. Fifty years ago. Curse you, Lord of Light! But the thing is, I started it, so technically that’s success.
All in all, not too bad. Of course, then there’s my 3rd-Q resolution, reprinted below, in which I promise (threaten) to write a story every month for something like 20 months or so. So far, I am on point with that. And I think I will continue to be on point, with some modifications, which I will discuss in my follow-up post regarding my real honest New Year’s Resolutions! Ooooh!
And yes, I am pushing off the Third Commandment into the New Year. Sorry, but this seemed more amusing. To me. Now excuse me while I push out through this wailing throng of broken-hearted readers to get to the door….
posted by Jp @ 5:56 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Please tell me that you aren't using the ole' "Zelazny wrote my story so I can't write it" excuse, 'cause I want to read a modern epic SF.
seriously, I felt really good about my story in which, on a distant planet, the people are controlled by immortal humans who live in space and pretended to be mesopotamian gods. Then at the end of the month, carrie sent me an email with the blurb for Zelazny's Lord of Light, in which, on a distant planet, people are controlled by immortal humans who live in space and pretend to be hindu gods. Dammit!
But actually I picked the beginning of that old manuscript up just today, dusted it off, and decided that I liked what was there, so I'll keep writing, and hopefully somewhere along the way, a new plot will spontaneously generate...
I can relate. I started a huge project last year, at the prompting of an agent. I wrote a 25 page synopsis, handed it to one of my readers who promptly said, "that's a nice version of X."
Which put me off of it for the year.
But what you just described isn't plot, it's the scenario. I mean, that isn't that far off from Star Gate, with the Goa'ould.
I've had a similar short story idea - a King Arthur retelling, except it is a distant planet with a small number of immortal humans who found the planet after 'the exodus'. They orignally land with the 'Prime Directive' non-interference blah blah blah, but over the centuries, they start to add their own DNA to the indigenous primates, eventually leading up to two of the immortal humans being Merlin and Morgan Le Fay, essentially.
Ok, maybe the idea is a little big for a short story....
Patrick, I thought you were going back to that old project this year?
Well, I have three novels/projects that I want to work on. 1 YA SF, 1 Fantasy and 1 YA. The plain YA is the 'easiest' to write - single view point, modern setting - so, in some ways I am leaning toward crunching that out first.
But yeah, I plan on revisiting both the other projects which have each had significant work done on them.
BTW - Did you get my email about those workshop details? The short story workshops are awesome. 4 days with Sheila Williams! That'll teach you something!
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