This week I’m concentrating on ‘writing admin’, including work on an essay and a book review I’ve been asked to write, and sending out a few short stories in the hopes of selling them.
I’m also taking the chance to revisit stories that need rework before they go to a magazine; like the novels, my short fiction gets critiqued, and I apply the results to the first draft. I say ‘stories’, but I’ve had to be picky; the two main pieces awaiting rework are both novellas, and I don’t have time to do both of them justice. The one I’ve picked, ‘The Ships of Aleph’, is the easy option, as my critters only raised a few relatively minor points. It needs tweaking, but not major rewriting.
The first step is to re-read the piece, and I found myself enjoying this process. Okay, so I also found myself wincing at a few sentences, but overall it felt good to re-acquaint myself with that tale, and with the unusual gent who tells it.
Whether, once tweaked, ‘The Ships of Aleph’ will be good enough to see print is something a magazine editor gets to decide.
Great now I can see you getting writing advice from squirrels!
That would be ‘critters’ is in shorthand for ‘people who critique’. Not small furry animals, Joel.