Sunday, December 16, 2012

Sunday Links: December 16, 2012 Edition

I had let myself get horribly behind on short story submissions. This is normally something I'm very good about, however over the last couple of months in particular, as I got rejections I wasn't getting around to sending stories back out to another market. I've made a major push to that end this week and I'm basically caught up now. The only things not currently out the door are stories which I'm considering making revisions to before submitting them again. As of tonight I have 36 submissions out, five reprints and 31 originals. It feels good to be back to where I've got a lot of stories on on submission and I'm going to make a concerted effort to not fall behind again.

As a side note, with this week's efforts I've crossed the 300 mark for 2012 submissions. There was a point where I thought I might have 366, which would have been neat, but my slacking off in recent months ensured that wouldn't happen. Still, 300 submissions is a lot and I'm quite pleased with what I have accomplished.

Something in early 2013 I'll do a Year-in-Review for 2012 with all kinds of statistics. For now, though, let's move on to the writing-related links I've come across this week which I want to share:

"How to Cut the Filler and Tighten Your Book" (Laura Carlson guest-posting at K. M. Weiland's Wordplay) - Finding the parts of a draft which are non-essential can help make your story better. It's also possible to cut too much, so make sure that when you're trimming parts of your story away that you're trimming really do need to go. This can require a lot of honesty with yourself. Is that conversation between your main character and his mother really key to building up the reader's sense of their characters? Or did you just fall in love with a few neat lines of dialogue?

"Goal-Keeping from the Greats" (Bess Weatherby at DIY MFA) - A blog post for writers that deals with goals and uses hockey metaphors? How could I pass this up? Bess takes three key elements: Schedule, Community, and Rituals and talks about how those elements work together to help you meet your goals. I may not have a lot of writing-related rituals that I'm conscious of, but schedule and community have been huge parts of my writing success in the past year and a half.

"Writing in Small Chunks of Time - Pros and Cons" (Elizabeth Craig at Mystery Writing is Murder) - One of the things I often suggest for people who say they "don't have time to write" is that they look for small bits of time in their days where they could fit writing in to their schedule. This is a nice post discussing some of the ups and downs of following that type of writing routine.

Along with those links, here are my blog posts for this week.

"On Goals and Aspirations" - Monday I wrote about how I separate goals and aspirations in my mind and the value of having such a separation.

"December Goals Progress and Holiday Hiatus" - Thursday I talked about how I'm doing toward my December goals and also announced the dates I'll be taking off from blogging around Christmas..

The last few days of 2012 are on their way. Here's to a great end of the year and an even better start to 2013!

1 comment:

  1. Wow! you are amazing in short stories. I will be waiting to read your post daily, it is very interesting. Thank you.

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