Well, that’s July done. Not a fantastic month in terms of output. But a satisfying one in terms of editing, polishing a whole 12 chapters of my fantasy murder mystery novel. On top of working fulltime and doing a bit of study, that is a heaven of a lot of editing for me, and I feel like this project (which stalled for two years) is flying ahead.
I deliberately didn’t count the number of rejections I had on the same two short stories (but I think it was 6 or 7 all up). I actually gained a Personal Best in rejection time: submitted and rejected all in under 4 hours! Ya just gotta check a few new markets, find one that the story will serve well and send it on back out there. Then turn away. Get on with other things.
Early in the month, I made the decision that I’d leave short story writing for the time being and focus on my two novel projects. One (the shiny new idea / first draft) is where I go to play when I get sick of editing. The other (the nose-to-the-grindstone second draft) is coming along reasonably nicely. I find that in a first draft the idea that it’s ok to write crap and fix it later works well for me. But when I get to Draft 2 and a couple of chapters still don’t work for me, it can be a little disheartening. Fortunately with my new purchase (Scrivener), I’m finding I’m editing faster and by editing faster I’m keeping a better big picture view of the book and feeling great about it. Those other pesky chapters will get fixed in the next polish run.
Bit of a patchy post but that’s the state of my brain at the moment. Bring on August…
When you are ready to return to the short story market, I have the follow-up to Illegal in mind all the way down to the viewpoint character. I’ll type up my notes soon and send them to you, and when you’re ready we’ll head back to 12 Victoria! Kevin
Cool. Your name goes first on this next one, buddy!
I also had an idea of morphing another story idea to fitting with 12 Victoria and its environs. Might have three in the series by Christmas!