Sunday Links: September 11, 2011 Edition

In addition to my usual Sunday link roundup this week, I'll be responding to some recent blog awards which have been presented to me.

Glitter Lady presented me with the Versatile Blogger award  which calls for listing 7 random facts about yourself and linking back to 15 (!) blogs.  I also received this award from Ms. Saba at Of Thoughts and Words.
Annalise Green presented me with a 2nd Liebster Award which calls for passing the award along to several other blogs.  And I just saw that Kate Lineberger also presented me a Liebster!
Finally, Daina Rustin at Mystic Treehouse tagged me to list 10 random facts and tag back five other bloggers.

Whew! OK, so to keep this something vaguely resembling simple, I'll list a total of 10 random facts and tag back a total of five bloggers.  Everyone I tag back can consider themselves recipients of both the Liebster and the Versatile Blogger award.

But first, this week's links!

Stretching Out

In the last six weeks I've written first drafts of 16 stories ranging in length from 200 words to about 5500 words. Many of these have gone through revisions and/or Beta and are out to markets. I'm thrilled with the volume of writing I've gotten done, but I'm also running into a situation where I'm starting to feel like I'm doing some serious juggling. Several of my stories have sat in first draft now for 1-2 weeks without me revisiting them for a second draft. This is due to a combination of factors. One is that I'm spending time doing revisions of slightly older stories based on feedback from Beta crit partners. The other is that with my goal of having 500 news words every day and with the fact that my average story length is about 2000 words, I'm producing at least two new stories a week. Finally, just the process of submitting all these stories is taking a non-trivial chunk of time.

The longest story I've ever written is just under 10,000 words. When I first started investigating being published -- around 1990 -- the common wisdom was that novelettes and novellas were next-to-impossible to sell for non-established writers. That might be a bit less true today if you consider self-publishing options. But, for now, I'm still primarily interested in following the "traditional" publishing route. I'm interested in learning about self-publishing, but not ready to jump into those waters yet.

I've already planned to do NaNoWriMo in November. But I've got two novel ideas and I'm feeling the itch to try to start diving in to one of them sooner than that. Starting on one of these would let me keep working on writing every day while not adding to my backlog of short stories. I could still write a short if the mood struck me. In fact, I'll probably try to do that to make sure I don't let the short story muscles I've been building up recently get flabby. Looking at themed issues and anthologies seems like a possible way to keep myself using those skills.

On the one hand, it's an exciting thought, tackling something new. On the other hand, it's scary. A novel is a big project representing a lot of time commitment. The thought of spending all that time on something that possibly no one but my Betas would ever read is unsettling. But I think I'm going to take the plunge.

I'd love any advice from people who have gone through that shift of writing shorts to writing novels. Naturally, I'll keep everyone posted on my progress. My plan at the moment is to do some preliminary work over the next few days (while getting my 500 words in on other tasks) and start Chapter 1 by the middle of next week.

OK, I've said it. Now I just have to trust in myself and let peer pressure help keep me "honest" to what I've decided I want to do.

Paying it Forward... Liebster Awards

Last week Angela Brown bestowed the Liebster Award to me and four other bloggers. What is the Liebster Award? "The basic idea of the Liebster Award is to showcase bloggers with less than 200 followers." The name, though it may put pulp and science fiction fans in mind of Murray Leinster, is derived from a German term for a close friend.

The tradition with the Liebster Award is to pass it along to five other blogs and I'm doing that today. I am apparently not yet "hip" to how I can determine which blogs have fewer than 200 followers. Unless they had a Google Reader box showing follower count, I was clueless. But I did try to find blogs which didn't appear to be flooded with existing reader comments. Tricky, in the midst of this Platform-Building Campaign!  :)

Without further ado, the Liebsters go to...

The Chamber - First WriteCampaign Challenge

The first challenge of Rachael Harrie's Platform-Building Campaign has been issued. The challenge is to write a story of 200 words or fewer, starting with the words "The door swung open." Extra degrees of difficulty can be added by ending the story with the words "the door swung shut" and/or hitting exactly 200 words. Naturally, I couldn't make it easy on myself...

I hope you enjoy this little story, where a number of people step into, but don't step out of...

The Chamber

The door swung open. The next person in line entered the empty chamber. Dr. Ziegler fiddled with the control panel and the chamber door closed. A buzz filled the room. A light on the panel switched from steady green to flashing amber. A minute later the door re-opened on a barren chamber.

Expect the Unexpected

So, this Labor Day morning has not gone as I expected. I woke up to the sound -- so I thought -- of someone showering in the hall bathroom. I didn't have to get up right away, so I was still relaxing in bed when one of our children came in. She told me that the upstairs bathroom toilet was overflowing and that the floor was soaked. That sounded bad.

I realized it was worse when I walked downstairs and saw torrents of water running through the ceiling into our kitchen. But, as they say, wait... there's more.

The basement also had water flowing into it from its ceiling.

We've taken a first pass at cleaning up and are waiting for a service company to come out to help with the damage as I type this post. I'm not writing this up for sympathy (though I'd certainly accept any sent my way) but because in considering this morning I realized it provides a valuable lesson for writers. See what I mean, past the jump...

Sunday Links : September 4, 2011 Edition

I don't think I've ever explicitly stated my blogging schedule in full. I post new items every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  Every other week, the Wednesday post previews the new Dissecting the Short Story entry and Friday is the full dissection. Sundays I post links to new articles from the week that I found interesting and also recap the week on my blog.

Now, to the links!

Dissecting the Short Story: "Less Stately Mansions" by Rob Chilson

This is the second of a series of posts (introduced here) which will appear once every two weeks on the blog. In this series, a short story from a recent major digest will be analyzed in detail, to see what we can learn about how the author approached creating the story.

Story:
"Less Stately Mansions" by Rob Chilson
Published in: 
July/August 2011 Fantasy and Science Fiction
Approximate Length:
6000 words
Presentation:
Chronological Narrative, Third-Person Limited
Summary [WARNING: Spoilers Included!]:
An older man, Jacob Mannheim, lives as a farmer on Earth of the distant future. Many people on Earth have emigrated to colonies; there are generous buyout offers for people who own land on Earth and will emigrate. An impending ecological disaster -- a great freeze -- will lead to his land eventually being worthless. However, Jacob has no interest in abandoning his farm and his younger relatives are distraught that he won't accept the buyout which would enrich their eventual inheritance.