“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.

Whew! That was quite a job! But another milestone accomplished

Before I was so rudely interrupted by my body, I was working on finishing the first in-depth revision of Moving on Nightfall, with about 20ish pages left to go. (I say 20ish because I have less, but there are some parts I need to expand, so the page count will go up slightly.) Revising is hard work. There are times I really like it, such as when I take a story that is very rough and make it open and exposed and clear. And turning a mediocre rough draft into a good piece of writing is great fun. Revising short stories takes a lot of time, but there is a clear end in sight, 2, 7, 13, 22 pages. Easy enough goals to see the end of.

Revising a book however, is quite different. When I was writing the first draft of Moving on Nightfall, I was focused on getting it down, so I ended up with many contradictions in plot, and characters turned out much differently than I planned. Pushing out the last fifty pages was hard; I was tired of the story, frustrated about the ending, and I just wanted it done. So obviously, when I went back to start revising, I thought it would be easier than writing those those last 50 pages.

Yeah right.

Revising a work of this length is a lot of work- especially since there were so many plot kinks I needed to work out and so many characters I needed to shape more fully. And since the end of the book was harder for me to push out, the further along in revising I got, the harder it was because of all of the abbreviated scenes and tripped up plots lines. This last 20ish pages to go and the 30 before those have been really hard. So I am pushing hard to finish revising this last section, and I know it will feel good when I finally get it done, but damn, it is a pain in the ass.

I actually think (hope) that perhaps the next revision is going to go a lot smoother, simply because I have fixed a lot of the knots and can focus more on language and flow. At least, that is what I am telling myself.

Jenny lives in a big city, so I did some research on queer youth in cities. One of the biggest cities with a very high percentage of GLBTQ homeless youth is New York City, and so several of my links led there.

75 Beds for 1,254 Kids: One third of NYC’s 3,800 homeless youths are LGBT
State of the City’s Homeless Youth Report 2003
Editorial Observer; Helping Them Make It Through the Night
A Life and Death on NYC Streets

There also are some articles on how these kids get to be on the street.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth: An epidemic of homelessness
Throwaway Teens – a 20/20 report on how some of these kids end up on the street.

And I also bookmarked some trans articles on homelessness and its side effects -
Making Change: The Cost of Being Transgender
It’s a trans world
Crossing to Safety: Transgender Health & Homelessness
Engaging Transgender Substance Users in Substance Use Treatment

And also, the book Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers by Cris Beam.

None of these will actually go into or give me my story. Rather, it’s like visiting a place to get the feel for it – it will help me to add that air of authenticity of something I already know, but want to make very clear.

With Moving on Nightfall I am going to be experimenting with writing a series of flash fiction pieces that take place outside of the main narrative. One of my goals is to of course make my readers curious about the novel itself, but also to explore for myself a little more of my world and characters, push them in directions I might not have thought of, and in general mess around with them (always good).

So right now, I am working on crystallizing what Jenny’s “home” in the abandoned subway station looked like. I’m ignoring any “mole people” references, as the main book that talked about them has been greatly discredited. I have a lot of my own experiences and knowledge to draw on, but I want to explore the makeup of her shelter fully, so I’ve done some research to broaden my ideas. Granted, this is a very small part of the story, but it is the first important setting, it tells a lot about Jenny, and it sets up a lot of the story for the reader. Below are some of the best sites I found in my hunt.

Abandoned subway stations:

Three pages of beautiful shots from the (sadly no longer updated) NYC photolog Satan’s Laundry

• 42^nd Street
• Chambers Street
• Tunnel

The Ltvsquad has a lot of great pictures from years of subway exploring, but one of the best pages I found there for my research is the Sperm Whale / Snipers Alley story.

An extensive description with pictures of the abandoned parts of the NYC subway station.
Closed stations in the Paris subway system
Cincinnati’s Abandoned Subway
Closed Boston Stations

A couple of articles on homeless people and subways:

One about a group who lived under Manhattan in the early 1990′s
Another about how some homeless ride the lines all day

And a documentary that Will told me about last week – Dark Days. (there’s stills from the film here as well.)

Good stuff, and great background research.

As a character, Jenny changes and grows quite a bit through the book. She’s tough and street-smart, and she knows how to survive, but at the same time she rolls with the punches and doesn’t always stand up for herself, instead focusing on survival. That is one of the things that change about her as the novel goes on, in that she thinks about what she wants, how to get it, and how to stand up for herself even when she’s scared. It’s always good when a character grows through the progression of a story. It is when they don’t change and/or grow as I write that I have to stop and re-evaluate what I am putting down. If the characters don’t change, when realistically they should be, I know I am heading down the wrong way and need to take a step back from my write and figure out where I went wrong.

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.