Summer

This summer should be interesting. I have a whole bunch of things I would like to do, and I have no idea how many of them I will actuallly accomplish. But with any luck I will accomplish something.

Firstly, I am on the poetry team that is going to the National Poetry Slam in August. So I have practices and fundraisers for that. This is probably my first priority, but it's not going to take up all of my time. My other "goals" for the summer include the following.

There is an anime club at NAU, so I would like to get caught up on Naruto episodes, before the summer is over. I have about 70 episodes left of Naruto, and then there are about 70 or so of Naruto: Shippuden after that. This is a rather ambitious goal, but one I hope to at least make significant progress on.

After I get back from NAU Freshman Orientation, I would also like to get a job. This trip to Wisconsin for Nationals isn't going to pay for itself. That, and I would like to have a little money for college.

Which leads me to my departure from this house. While I'm not leaving forever, I would like to have a good idea of the location and status of most of my possesions. I have a bunch of books I haven't read, and I don't want to get rid of them. But I also would like to finish LotR this summer. I finished Fellowship a while back, so I'm re-reading it, and then moving on to the other two.

Then we have the novel. I haven't touched the thing in weeks, and next November is looming. I would like to have at least completed one viscious edit before starting on another novel. I may have to resume my schedule of early rising so that I can actually work without distractions. I've only done about 15 pages of 600 so far, so that is also a pretty ambitious goal.

I also would like to try to get a story published so that book publishers will look at me a little more seriously.

I also have a gew goals that are not progressive, but are still on the list. I would like to get a decent digital camera and take pictures downtown. I would like to recite poetry during a monsoon storm. And I would like to write a poem about tucson or the desert in general.

I'm going to try some progress bars here, to motivate me. Wish me luck on my ambitious summer plans!

Markets

I mentioned in a previous post that I got "Novel & Short Story Writer's Market" recently and was overwhelmed by the huge number of entries. But its better now. I want to get paid for my writing, so I went through all three big lists of short story markets, literary magazines, small circulation publications, and consumer magazines and put every paying market into an excel document. This was about 150 markets. Then I went through and eliminated the markets that only work with established writers, and the ones that only publish things I will never write, like Christian magazines. This narrowed it down to 85 markets.

At this point I did a "save as" and began yet another round of eliminations. This time I chose a specific story of mine and eliminated all the markets that would never publish it, based on length or genre. Now I am down to 33 markets, two of which are consumer magazines. The next step is to sort the markets into the ones that seem best for this story, and the others that are not an excellent match. This will determine the order in which I send out these stories. Also if a magazine does not accept simultaneous submissions then they will have to have their own round of submissions. I suspect this may be true of the consumer magazines.

But right now I am going to submit my story to my writer's group, so it can be brimming with as much awesomeness as possible before I start sending it out. Wish me luck!

Publishing

My copy of "2008: Novel & Short Story Writer's Market." just arrived in the mail today. Now I have to sort through the several hundred listings to find short story markets that will accept me and pay me for my glorious work. That way when I attempt to sell the brick I mentioned in my last post I will have some publishing experience to prove my merit. Apparently being the self-proclaimed, Grandmaster of the Universe won't be enough to catch an agents eye.

Brick

This November I wrote a novel for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. If you're interested there's a link on the left. But I only wrote the first fifty thousand words of it. Then for the next six weeks I finished it coming in at a whopping 107,000 words. (Which for the record is not terribly long for an average book) So I ran it through spell check which took about a week, cut out the big chunks I knew didn't belong, and then spent a small fortune having it printed. The good news is that if I ever sell this novel I can write that off as an expense.

The bad news is I have a stack of papers nearly four inches high waiting to be edited. I've done the first 19 pages or so, but the whole thing is 610. My english teacher, in her infinite awesomeness has agreed to look at my novel once I edit it. I told her I would have it ready around late March, early April. In order for me to pull that off I need about 14 or 15 pages of editing done every single day. Being a writer is hard.