Beignets! I cooked em for breakfast. Not shown: burning canola oil scars, powdered sugar debacle, or dough-gummed sink. Oh well! It made for a good breakfast, beginning to a hopefully even better day. This evening, I’ll be seeing L’Italiana in Algeri by Gioachino Rossini somewhere in New Haven. (I’m a guest. The arrangements have been made without me having to worry about it.) I can’t say I know anything about the play (The Italian in Algeria…that means something I guess), but everything I’ve been treated to down there has been excellent.
As for my own creative accomplishments, I finished another short story, this one entitled Hull Breach. I’m planning on submitting it to…someone…today, but I haven’t decided who yet. At the moment, Clarkesworld, looks like the best. The online submission form makes life significantly easier. Strange Horizons, an online e-zine (but a paying one), also has a nice online submission form that saves me a little stamp money. Lastly, there’s the trio of big science fiction print publications, analog, SF&F, and asimovs. I currently have a story out to Asimov, so that’s off the list and I just got a rejection slip from SF&F, so I’m not feeling the love there at the moment. I don’t really want to submit this story to Analog just yet, because if my other story gets rejected I’d prefer to send it there than this one. This story definitely isn’t as good…
That isn’t say I’m not damn happy to have it done finally. Pain in the ass from beginning to end. I wrote once it in full. Hated it. Started over. 2nd draft was terrible. I took my first throwaway and merged it with my second throwaway to make it into a mostly complete draft that told a nice little story, but also bored me to tears. In a pique of desperation I added a second viewpoint, which let me pull some of the text away from the first viewpoint and add a little extra color to the world. By checker-boarding the viewpoints (1st view, 2nd view, 1st, 2nd etc) it made for a much more interesting read, and actually made the scenario a little clearer overall (the danger of tossing in two many disparate points of view). Unfortunately, none of these drafts solved the fundamental problem: the story had no end. It was never really a story in the first place, really just a premise explored (What would generic person A do if ordered to destroy Earth).
I’ve yet to figure out exactly where inspiration comes from, but during the last and final edit I managed to put in a few lines right at the end that provided an acceptable coda, if not an especially fulfilling finale. In total, the story came out to some 4300 words, less than half the length of my last short story despite spending at least twice as much time on it. Sigh!
I’ve got a few more stories on the docket, but for the moment I want to concentrate on taking what I’ve got and putting it out somewhere. I’ve become increasingly of the mind that publication is less like sniping and more like a shotgun blast. There doesn’t appear to be any good way to choose a publication and design something for them, you just have to write a billion things and figure someone out there will pay for something someday. At least, that’s the theory that I’m currently working on. Future updates guaranteed, I’m sure.
I won’t be leaving for New Haven for another 6 hours, so I’ve got sometime to get some research done, maybe start a story, keep playing Napoleonic Total War, etc. I really do have too many hobbies, but really, what else would I do with my time? Tomorrow is Tennis, possibly Minnewaska, probably some web-design upkeep. Enthralling stuff I know.
Before I get to rambling on the nuances of freelance web-design, allow my to play myself off with a picture of my home-cooked (from a box mix) beignets!
