Before I go into my year-end statistics overview, a happy announcement. I had two stories go live last month,

“Tumbleweeds and Highways” was published in Clean Sheets.

“Web of Death” was published in MicroHorror.

I also finished the month on 100 Words which you can read at Val Gryphin’s December Batch.

Go check them out and if you have any comments feel free to leave them for me.

Go! Shoo! Then you can come back and read my stats!

Now, where were we. Ah yes.

In the year 2008, (According to my lovely Duotrope) I had 74 new submissions to 57 different markets, on 17 different pieces, with 11 submissions still out for consideration.

Of those 63 completed submissions I had 48 rejections:

• * 1 assumed rejection
• * 7 personal rejections
• * 40 form rejections

I also:

• * had 1 rewrite request
• * withdrew 7 submissions

And, (the best part) I received 7 acceptances, of which 3 have gone to print.

Other interesting facts:

• * the shortest response time was 0 days
• * the longest one is still out at 216 days
• * the next is an assumed rejection at 200 days (yes, I had emailed to check on it.)
• * the longest actual rejection was 189 days
• * of the acceptances, I had one that was 0 days and one that was 127
• * the piece that went out the most went out 13 times so far (and still not accepted!)

Overall I consider it a very successful year. I met agents and learned more about the business at a writer’s conference, and developed an elevator pitch I was able to give to an agent I respected. I was also requested to send the first 100 pages of my novel, which, even though it was rejected, was a great experience. I completed both NaNoWriMo and a month of 100 Words. I did a hard revision on Moving on Nightfall and am 2/3rds of the way through my second novel.

Yes, overall, it very good writing year.

Because the pipe under my kitchen sink – of which the u-joint was replaced a few weeks ago with a new plastic part rather than the metal joint it did have – just separated where the metal and plastic meet. As I was Drainoing the sink, I got sprayed with hot Draino-water.  And no, this is not something to inspire a short story. Gurrr

100 Words is going well. It is a very different writing set of muscles to use than for NaNo, but I am enjoying it. I’m looking at each one as being a short story or clip of 100 words, and I’m actually coming up with some decent stuff.

I’m posting the entry for 12/6/08, below, but I’m testing making it so the fiction won’t show on the RSS feed. So, you’ll have to click on the post title to come here and read it on the site. This may change , I’m experimenting with it right now. Let me know if you hate it.

100 Words

Supposedly he wrote the book, but in reality it was his computer. The writer would sit for hours at his desk, and pound out a few sentences that may or may not have made sense. Meanwhile he’d be getting drunk, beer by beer, until finally he’d stagger to bed.

The computer had fallen in love with the heroine of the novel, created back when the writer had been mostly sober. Night by night the computer wrote the story, and in the mornings, hung over and forgetful, the writer would read, and be pleased with, what he’d written the night before.

the blogging must go on – particularly as I haven’t been blogging much over NaNo.

I am starting 100 words, and I think it will be a really good thing for me. While I am finishing my NaNo. heh. Here’s today’s.

100 Words

She thought that the sensation of the migraine was like someone taking tweezers, and slowly pulling out the veins in her head, one by one, like someone pulling out unneeded threads from an old sweater. If she lay very, very, still, she could almost hear each one as it snapped off, leaving her face without a scaffolding. She thought about how her face would look, slowly crumpling under the weight of her skin, without anything to keep it up, kind of like one of those dried apple face dolls that sat on the shelf behind her dead grandmother’s kitchen sink.

I was looking up Tom Waits on Wikipedia and I came across this quote talking about how his voice sounds

“like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car.”

Ok, so it’s not what you would call perhaps, delicate, lovely writing, but damn it is good. It sums up exactly what his voice sounds like in a way that you’ll never forget. It is gritty and solid and real and concise. In my eyes, it is perfect.

I’ve known quite a few writers who feel like outlining their short story or novel is the best and more efferent way to get their writing done. Often they also like to do character sketches either before or during the writing process because they feel like this helps them to fully understand their protagonists and secondary characters. Many of writing books and websites also say the same thing, some even go so far as to say this is the way it “should” be done.

This method has never worked for me however. I’ve tried to start with an outline and character sketches, but one of two things always ends up happening. Either I already know the ending so it’s not as intriguing for me to write, and I have trouble getting from point A to point B, or more commonly, the characters do not do what I tell them to. Yes, my characters have minds of their own. And they don’t like it when I tell them they are supposed to act a certain way or do a specific thing. They end up coming to life, and I find that when I try to make them stick to what I have planned they end up coming out very flat, and not rounded as they should be.

Yes, my name is Val, and I hear voices when I write.

On the serious side, I rarely know what is going to happen further than a scene or two ahead in the piece I am working on. This does make for some odd kinks in the story sometimes, sometimes things I write won’t make sense in the context of the finished work, but I don’t edit as I write the rough draft; but that is where revising comes in.

For instance, the novel I am currently revising, working title Moving on Nightfall, started with an image. I have over my net travels read about people who live in abandoned subway stations, and one day I was trying to think of a story starter, and someone said something about subways, and said, That’s it! So I started with this image of an abandoned subway station, with some light coming is from a glassed-in panel in the ceiling, and a little nest made of discarded items. My protagonist is a girl named Jenny, and from the beginning I knew that while she was street smart, she had also been beaten on by life, and tended to retreat into herself when she didn’t know how to control what was going on around her. And there was another character who shared the station, a crazy old alcoholic vet named Sunny who sees himself as her protector. As I started to write it I learned about the characters as I got into it, and they grew more real and round. Jenny works as a prostitute, she does art, she’s a transsexual, and she still has a touch of naïvety about her. Sunny is big and gruff and obnoxious, but accepts Jenny for who she is, and heaven help anyone he catches messing with her.

While I started out with the story I had no idea where it was going to go. I was thinking it might have a fantasy twist, and it did turn out to be an urban fantasy. But while the main concept of the story stayed the same, many of the details of how it worked shifted several times throughout the writing of the novel. So on the revision, now that I completely understand how the story works, I am going back and editing details so the whole story works together, sometimes rewriting scenes.

I have a lot more to say on this, but I’ll start with this overview, and go further into details in other posts. I also plan on talking more about Moving on Nightfall.