Created a New Blog, Played More Basketball

So I jumped back in the saddle and played another full court game down on campus today. Some of the same guys were there. I wasn't great, but this time I made a few plays across the board--tough rebound, defense, shot in traffic, pass in traffic--that got some love from the other members of my team. Still couldn't hit the outside shot. Lifting weights first might have contributed to that, but it also seemed to calm me down a bit at the start. Have to figure it all out slowly. Don't think I can play more than a couple days a week at most. We'll see how much agony I'm in tonight.

Also created a new blog, Sand Dreaming of Stars, just to post my fiction and some of my poems. Becoming an official, paid, published writer is less a part of my dream than just getting my ideas out of my head and into the world. I still plan on submitting things, but I'm also going to put rejected or in progress material here under a Creative Commons 3.0 noncommercial license. If it ever gets to the point where somebody cares about who has first publishing rights to something I've already posted, I'll have made much more progress than I have to date.

Got a Rejection

What a crap day. I played full court basketball for the first time in a year today, didn't play well, got completely exhausted, hurt my leg a bit, and felt quite old.

I noticed that my right front tire is very low on air pressure when I got home (maybe a slow leak, don't know yet) and found that my portable air compressor had a dead battery. Hopefully I can get it recharged in time to pump up the tire to take the kids to school tomorrow.

My neighbors who had asked me to watch/feed their six pets on Friday then revealed that they needed me to be taking care of them Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Then, right as I was getting ready for bed, while doing something else on the computer, two new emails arrived, one of which was a rejection for my flash fiction story "The Cold Portions" from Flash Fiction.

You might recall that my first submission to them got a very positively worded rejection email.

This one was a little simpler and much less helpful. "Unfortunately, I'm going to pass on The Cold Portions."

I felt pretty proud of this story and I have to admit I'm surprised as well as disappointed at the rejection and the utter lack of interest it conveyed.

2010 sucks so far and it's not like 2009 had raised the bar particularly high.

Writing Goals and Submitting Stories

At the beginning of December, I went over my list of goals for the year in order to evaluate and revise them.

One of those goals involved writing. I wanted to spend at least X number of hours writing fiction in 2009. I even specified that I shouldn't count the time spent writing about setting material toward achieving that goal. I know my habits in this regard.

Well, I did not meet that goal. I can't say for certain how far short I fell, because very early on I stopped keeping track. I just know that I would have had to write an hour a day every day (and then a little extra) to meet it and I did not do that.

In the past I've had similar goals, all based around writing for a certain amount of time or to produce a certain number of words on a daily basis. Because I've heard lots of advice that you should write every day to develop the work habits and professionalism needed to become a success.

My current approach is different. Now, instead of trying to hit daily writing goals, I'm trying to finish stories. That's pretty much it. My goal is to write roughly one short story of moderate length (say, 5,000 words or so) every month, or a very short story (like a flash fiction piece of under 1,000 words) every couple weeks.

In terms of how much I write on any given day, this goal doesn't necessarily translate into a lot of new words on the page or a lot of time at the keyboard or notepad. But it has occurred to me that those daily writing goals tend to focus upon the peripheral aspects of writing rather than the end result--a story I like well enough to submit to a paying market.

How has this worked out so far? Well, at the moment I'm a bit ahead of schedule. I started writing on December 7th and yesterday I submitted my second complete flash fiction story to a paying market: Flash Fiction online, no less. That tops my entire short story output for the entire year.

I think the pace of a story a week will taper off as I start to work on freelance projects. But I think my initial goals are still achievable. Thirty days to write 5,000 words works out to less than 170 words a day.

The truth is that the writing has come in bursts. I wrote one story in its entirety in a single day and then spent the rest of the week revising it, probably accounting for no more than 150 new words. But they were important words. The other story I wrote in a couple bursts and then rewrote quite heavily in another chunk.

In between working on the stories, I spent time thinking about the stories and what I was trying to achieve with them. I also sent them out for comments by friends and family. Then I spent my writing time each day going over the story in some detail and tweaking it as I thought necessary.

Since my goal is to complete stories and submit them to professional markets, I don't think quite as much about the process as I used to. I'm concentrating more on the stories themselves. As a result, I'm working in more of a natural flow. Some days are just more productive than other days in terms of raw output, but other days that are superficially less productive are just as vital for the flashes of insight into a story that they provide. Focusing on shorter lengths has also helped keep my wandering mind from digressing down too many paths.

Rejection was never so sweet

So I got my first rejection letter today via email from one of the editors at the online publisher Flash Fiction for the piece Tinkertoy Genii (specifically the version I recently posted). Flash Fiction specializes in stories of 1,000 words or less.

I have to say, for a rejection it was one of the nicest communiques I've ever gotten from a stranger. Here's an excerpt:

"For a previously unpublished fiction writer, your writing is excellent, the storyline fascinating, the details believable, the conflict gripping."

Now, as it turns out, I didn't resolve the main conflict in the story in the very short word count available, and the editor kindly pointed this out in rejecting it. Can't really argue with that, to be honest, and you'll notice it if you take the time to read the story. Flash Fiction is a tricky format and I'm a novice.

On the bright side, the editor closed with this encouragement:

"While I can't accept "Tinkertoy Genii" I sincerely hope you will continue writing and submitting and studying the craft of flash fiction writing as I truly believe it is valuable in honing a writer's all-around skills. I look forward, as well, to receiving more submissions from you in the future."

I have a couple other ideas that I've written up as rather clunky vignettes that might work in the Flash Fiction format, so I'm going to give those a go in the near future while working on the Illyria novel.

Anyway, after several days of being sidetracked with other work or getting stuck on setting issues, I sat down this morning and wrote 2,000 words for the second chapter and got this pretty positive rejection letter, so I'm feeling much better than I was at this time yesterday.

Vignette: Tinkertoy Genii Final Submission

Tinkertoy Genii by Doug Sims
The voice was a dull, distant roar, rousing her from the depths. Light and sound overloaded her senses, her mind spinning wildly. A memory fitted here, a skill slotted there, an emotion relearned, a pattern recalled. Sounds forming words, words falling through holes in a net being spun furiously but still maddeningly incomplete. Until clarity came at last.
She was disappointed to discover her vision resolved in grainy black and white. Worse was the realization that not only could she not move, she lacked any physical sensation. Her body was simply gone, a void. Good grief, she thought, What kind of retrotech shell have they dumped me into?
The voice continued. “Refugee Valerie Shem, are you conscious and self-aware? This is your scheduled debriefing with the Talos Orbital Authority. Refugee Valerie Shem, are you conscious and self-aware? This is—”
“Yes, yes!” she interrupted. Her voice sounded tinny, tinged with static. Where was here? No, the voice had said that much. Focus! “In what form is my consciousness currently embodied?”
The recording paused. She studied the grainy image of an insectoid drone, sprouting metallic legs at crazy angles, an eyestalk wobbling in front of whatever camera was providing her narrow field of vision. “Ah yes,” continued the drone. The operator was probably running half a dozen of these remotes, interrupting automated procedures as needed. “Greetings. You are currently being stored on a backup server in Talos Orbital spacedock.”
Backup server? Her sense of calm dissolved. “Backup” meant file compression, downtime, dormancy, which in turn spelled fragmentation and memory loss. Questions flooded her mind. Who had been her advisor at the Polytechnic? Where had she seen that glorious sunset on Ramses?
Holes. Like missing teeth, like itches she couldn’t scratch.
“What is my storage medium?” she shouted as loud as the damn box would let her.
“Ah,” said the drone, hesitating. “Nanotubes.”
“Tinkertoys!” cried Valerie. “You can’t preserve a recorded personality on a rod logic system! I demand an upload to a DNA matrix or a quantum computer. And I want a full-mobility cybershell or an android host!”
“Nanotubes are the most robust medium for long term storage,” came the flat reply.
“Who gives a damn about long-term storage! I need full mind emulation now, before I degrade any further. I can afford whatever your backwards Orbital can produce!”
“Your credit account has a negative balance, Valerie Shem,” replied the drone curtly. “The cost of transmitting and receiving your ghost through hyperspace was not met by the funds on reserve with us. You are currently a ward of the state until your debt can be repaid.”
She remembered enough to respond to that. “My homeworld was sterilized by a solar flare!” screamed Valerie. “Why else would I evacuate to some forsaken cluster of satellites orbiting a gas giant in the ass-end of the civilized universe?” She paused, struggling to piece together her memories.
There were fewer gaps than she had first thought, but she noted a pattern to the missing data that belied random errors. “I think someone has sabotaged my records,” she said incredulously.
Her tone became more authoritative. “I request the opening of a formal investigation into the theft of my personal property and an assault upon my personal mind space.”
“Opening personal investigations requires a retainer to be deposited with Talos Orbital Security,” replied the drone.
Damn. She searched her memories frantically for some sense of who might have done this to her, hoping to find backup files hidden in her matrix. How clever had she been?
“Valerie Shem, I must inform you that you as an indigent ward of the Talos Orbital authority, your stored consciousness is scheduled for routine downtime to conserve energy and system resources.”
Bastards, she thought. She kept scanning herself.
There. A hidden memory file, with a recent time stamp. Accessing it, she found a sneaky piece of spyware, designed to record alterations to her cognitive structure. It told her nothing of her former life, potential enemies, or who had violated her mind.
But it might hold the solution to her current dilemma.
“What is the standard protocol in place on Talos for copyright and personal mindspace protection?” she asked.
The drone froze. “Level 1.2 quantum encryption,” it replied. “I fail to see—”
“I had Level 1.5 quantum encryption on my personal data, and it was hacked,” said Valerie.
“Opening an investigation into such matters requires a retainer—”
“I have a detailed record of the assault, showing how it was done, though not by whom,” interrupted Valerie. “This information might be of value to Talos Orbital Security, don’t you agree? Particularly given that the party involved is likely inhabiting your infosphere along with the other digital refugees.”
After a long pause, Valerie continued. “I might add that I have a worm program installed that will delete this information if anyone were to attempt to remove it from me by force.”
“You would run the risk of irreparable damage to your consciousness,” replied the drone.
“Do you think I want to live in this toybox?” she shot back.
The drone began tapping its long, slender appendages for what seemed like an eternity. Then, with a shake of its eyestalk, it spoke. “Valerie Shem, I am authorized to investigate your memory loss and, if your claim proves truthful, negotiate the purchase of your data recording on behalf of Talos Orbital Security.”
Valerie smiled to herself. They were hooked. Time to push. “Of course, I can hardly take part in such a negotiation in my current crippled state. I will need a full mind emulation running at baseline Human-Plus 2 clock speed to assess all parameters, the cost of same to be deducted from my fee.”
“Agreed,” said the drone, extending a probe toward an unseen panel. “Prepare for transfer to mind emulation.”
Before everything went black again, Valerie envisioned baring her teeth. Someone had tried to screw her, but they were going to find that this genii would not stay in her bottle.