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New Year's Eve
Dec. 31st, 2020 06:49 pmMe, January 1, 2020: I like the double 0's in this year name, the 01/01/2020 displays are visually amusing. Good start.
Sorry if I jinxed anything there.
Me, January 4, 2020:
Well, I had a little more writing time than expected, but overall--yeah, I made progress on that front. This year I had two publications (a short story in a paying but "semipro" venue, and a flash story in one that's "pro rates" but I'm still having some difficulty dealing with the logistics there). I'm not sure whether to say other than persistence helps, and the curve of "sometimes your ability to evaluate your own art grows faster than your own skill, so you oscillate between feeling amazing and looking back with horror on your old stuff" stuff is true.
The "less-lucrative but possibly more niche fit" venue alluded to above apparently crashed and burned, and then there were hints they'd be re-emerging, and then...they didn't, at this point I might as well give them a full year before abandoning ship >.<
I was working on Yuletide treats pretty much up to the deadline, so I rashly challenged myself to rework the space travel story in the last week of the year because that anthology call closes today. Sort of a "write drunk, edit sober" idea, or "the thing you dash off on a whim is sometimes better-received than the thing you tinker with for weeks." I'm...not confident that methodology applies here, but anyway, I got that done with hours to spare, so that was a thing.
Sorry if I jinxed anything there.
Me, January 4, 2020:
In other news, I mentioned I'm trying to be more deliberate about potentially-publishable original fiction. One component of that is looking to see if there are certain outlets/anthologies that might be good fits for me and writing something to those "targets." I've been aiming high in the past with SFWA qualifying outlets, but at the moment I'm trying to keep my options open if something less lucrative might be a better "fit."
Sometimes the advice "write what you know" is kind of useless, sometimes it's meaningful. I feel like the characters in the stories I'm working on now are more "me" than others have been, but in order to get the confidence I can do these stories well and not fall into self-absorption, I needed to practice writing far-flung characters/settings first, in order to approach these with enough wryness/distance that they can be realistically flawed, but also are authentic enough to be interesting. (That's the hope, anyway.)
Well, I had a little more writing time than expected, but overall--yeah, I made progress on that front. This year I had two publications (a short story in a paying but "semipro" venue, and a flash story in one that's "pro rates" but I'm still having some difficulty dealing with the logistics there). I'm not sure whether to say other than persistence helps, and the curve of "sometimes your ability to evaluate your own art grows faster than your own skill, so you oscillate between feeling amazing and looking back with horror on your old stuff" stuff is true.
The "less-lucrative but possibly more niche fit" venue alluded to above apparently crashed and burned, and then there were hints they'd be re-emerging, and then...they didn't, at this point I might as well give them a full year before abandoning ship >.<
I was working on Yuletide treats pretty much up to the deadline, so I rashly challenged myself to rework the space travel story in the last week of the year because that anthology call closes today. Sort of a "write drunk, edit sober" idea, or "the thing you dash off on a whim is sometimes better-received than the thing you tinker with for weeks." I'm...not confident that methodology applies here, but anyway, I got that done with hours to spare, so that was a thing.
