The home of fiction author Val Gryphin…

So of the stories I have out, three are running a long time, not a big deal.

But of the five I sent out in the last few weeks I have received two rejections already, from Not One of Us, and Vestal Review. One is for a long poem I am having a lot of trouble finding a market for, one of those hard-to-place pieces. The other was a piece of flash fiction that I really need to re-work. The other three that are out are stronger pieces, so I’m hoping for more luck with those.

On the upside, I finished revising another short story I’ve been working on, and it is going out this weekend. I also want to get a rough-draft revision done on the short piece that was just rejected. I also have everything I need printed for the residency done, and I’m reading the books I’ll need.

And yes, I think it might be spring here. Yea!!

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!

A nasty combo of the flu, returning to work for close to full time for the first time since the wreck, and a fairly major depressive episode managed to neatly take me 1-2-3 out of pretty much everything, including writing and blogging. But I am slowly crawling back to full speed, although it might take me a bit to get back to even a rapid crawl.

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.