The home of fiction author Val Gryphin…

It has been an insane few months. I attended my grad school residency, which went very well, and am currently working on my second packet. (Going half time is the best decision I could have made, more on that later.)

In July I attended a writers and agents conference, and pitched my novel Moving on Nightfall to a big name agent. It went very well, and she requested the first 100 pages of my novel. Unfortunately, she turned it down after reading it, but I learned so much about elevator pitches, and pitching to agents, and query letters just from that experience. I also have a lead on another agent who might like to see my work.

I currently have 9 stories out to 22 different markets. (I gave in on my avoidance of simultaneous submissions, although I don’t usually submit to markets that specifically say no to them in their guidelines. I have also found one or two that state by submitting they have the right to publish it, that is another post as well.)

Clean Sheets magazine accepted a piece of mine called “Tumbleweeds and Highways,” to be published probably within the next 4 months.

So this site will be active again as I spend more and more time working on not just the writing itself, but also the marketing and publication aspects!

I had to take a break unfortunately as the tail end of the semester kicked my proverbial ass. Because of my wreck in December I ended up way behind, so when you add my schoolwork and slowly working back up to full time at my job, it ended up being a lot. Plus, finishing my first revision was a huge step, so I relaxed LOL. I am going to design a sign graphic that I will hang when I am not posting for a few days so that you know I am not leaving, I am just working on stuff.

So after the revision of the book, I turned my focus to revising some of the stories I haven’t sent out yet. I have several stories that are making the rounds, but I also have a backlog of stories that are very close to finished that just need polishing, as well as some that are good but need a couple of revisions. So I’ve worked on that, and now I have eight stories out. Three that have been out for a while, but I also just sent stories to Glimmer Train, Clean Sheets, Modern Fiction Magazine, Not One of Us, and Vestal Review. Glimmer Train is a long shot I know, but still, I’d love to get published in there. I also have six in the pipeline for not a ton of revision, and then a few more that will take some work.

I’ve also been branching back out into multi-genre work. I love photography, drawing and oil and watercolor painting, but I haven’t done any of for a long time, like a few years. (Well, I have done photography when I traveled.) So I have been missing all of it a lot, and I decided that I need to get back into it. I think that it is important to branch out into different types of artistic works because they enrich and help other branches. (That will be the focus of an upcoming post.) I plan on posting pictures of my artwork as well as my photography here as I talk about how they are connected, and also to help me stick with it along with my writing.

So, back into the posting flow!