Writing at Last - Phew!

[jacey]

For the last couple of months Milford Writers' Conference has been looming on the horizon and with a place booked since spring I've known I needed up to 15,000 words in one or two pieces to submit for crit and discussion. In olden days, we used to have to take copies of our stories with us and the week consisted of a very heavy reading workload (mornings) critting workload (afternoons) and socialising workload (evenings), but with the advent of high speed internet we now send out our stories in advance to lighten the morning workload by enabling those of us who can to make a start on the reading.

Unfortunately this has had the effect of advancing the submission deadline to at least the week before the conference and many people submit a couple of months before, making those of us who are laggards feel doubly-tardy.

It's handy when Milford coincides with having a piece you're working on right now, of course. Last September I took the first section of my magic-pirate-adventure-quest novel 'Sea Witch and Rowankind' (then under the working title of 'The Elf-Oak Box') and, lo, I actually finished writing most of it in November, polished off the rest after Christmas, put it through beta readership in the spring, did the polish and... and... and I'm currently waiting for an agent to get back to me. Yeah, right! Same old, same old...

But this year I didn't have an obvious piece to take.

Yes I know, having got Sea Witch to an agentably submissible stage I should be leaping ahead on to a new project... but...

I have a book project which I took to Milford a year or two ago, got some generally positive, but constructive comments that made me change the focus from quest novel to political fantasy and I'm thinking of resubmitting that as one of my projects (It's Hari, FYI mevennen , bluehairsue and maeve_the_red , I think you've all seen him before)

I'm not a natural short story writer, but I do like to also take a short to Milford because the feedback is so fantastically helpful. I've had a story beginning on a back-burner for a couple of years. I really liked the beginning, but I couldn't quite get a grip on it. Well, yesterday and today I did it. I had about 1500 words in the pot already and now A Murder of Crows is complete at 7,500 words. (sigh) Yes I was hoping for shorter, too. I thought I might be able to do it in 4,000 words, but it got more complicated than that, and then the characters started to say: Yes, but what's my motivation?

Why am I not surprised that this story ended up at 7,500 words? Almost every damn short story I write ends up at least that long and in order to get them down to 5,000 or even 6,000 I end up cutting and stitching and polishing over the cracks. O, hell, I should just admit that I'm happiest at novel length, but I do keep trying.

Though luckily all the short stories I've sold have been similarly longish ones.

Anyhow I'm really pleased with 'A Murder of Crows' but I'm going to sit on it for a few days and re-read and further polish before sending it. So you'll get it in about a week, guys, OK?

In the meantime, now I know how long Murder of Crows is, I can prepare the first section of Hari (now provisionally entitled 'Spider on the Web') to use up the rest of my 15,000 word quota.

Comments

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I'm so very jealous that you're going to Milford again. I would love to go, and I even have enough vacation days, but I've been pretty much unable to write for most of the year, ever since my best friend died. The good news is that I'm starting to get over that and am kind of writing again. The bad news is that other awful things keep happening. I want the *ssh*les to leave me alone.

Have a great time at Milford. *sniff*

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry - I missed the news about your best friend. I lost one of mine almost ten years ago now (one who lived only a few hundred yards from me) and I still miss her. She was only 44. Sometimes I have to stop myself reaching for the phone to tell her things.

But the first year was undoubtedly the worst and once I got over that it started to get a bit easier.

It will always remain a sadness, though.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry about your loss. The anniversary of my friend's death is in about two weeks, and I'm amazed that I'm not breaking into tears at the thought of it. I've been having a hellacious time at work lately, though, which is distracting me. Joy.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

The thing is... I'm not generally a believer in afterlife or anything like that, but maybe I was influenced by the fact that my friend, Cres, was a spiritualist... anyhow...

Cres discovered she had inoperable stomach cancer in the June of 1998 and slowly declined over the next six months.

At that time we were touring full-on with Artisan, abroad and at home, with the Christmas Show being our biggest earner of the year. That year BB had written a new song for the Christmas Show called Paper Angels, a generally happy song but with one verse about friends who are here no more. So he ran it past me and said did I think I could cope because it was OK rehearsing this in September, but it was quite likely that by the time we got to December Cres would be numbered amongst the 'here no more' and having to sing something like that night after night would be like twisting a knife.

I said go ahead and we'd risk it. It was such a great song.

So we started the Christmas Show on 26th November and were due to play 28 gigs in 27 days with two matinees and just one day off on 16th December. We went into the show run with Cres very weak and settled in the local hospice with her husband by her side. I did get to visit once but she died on 12th December and - as luck would have it her funeral was on our one day off - 16th December, so I was able to attend.

Rather than feeling like a knife twisting, when it came to singing that Paper Angels in the show after she died I almost got the feeling she was in the audience somewhere, willing us on to do well. It became Cres's song.
The Christmas show run finished and life went on. Cres' widowed mover away to a croft in the wilds of Scotland to live by himself (where he still is), but for the next year whenever we sang that song I knew Cres was on tour with us. We took her to Canada, the States and all over the UK. She stood on stage with us at huge festivals and heard the audience going nuts for three middle aged singers from Yorkshire - her friends - and I knew she'd e proud of us, and I was glad of her company.

The following November came around and the Christmas Show run started at the end of the month. It got to round about the middle of the run and I was on stage, somewhere in the Midlands singing the 'friends are here no more' verse of Paper Angels when I suddenly realised that I didn't think Cres was there. When I checked the date it was 12th December. She'd just slipped away quietly while I wasn't looking.

No I don't believe in ghosts and yes maybe I was fooling myself, but whatever helps you get through it is fine by me.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I've had moments when I've felt that Teresa was here with me, too, but not so much anymore.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

here seems to be something about that one year period of mourning that's natural. Maybe you just have to rotate through all the seasons once without them.

[julesjones]

It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who writes 25k short stories. :-)

Milford sounds wonderful and I keep thinking I'd like to go, but with where my writing ended up it's simply not appropriate.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Do you only write erotica? I got the impression that was just one of the strings to your bow.

[julesjones]

I've written other stuff, but what I manage to sell is erotic romance. Mostly cross-genre that is actually speculative fiction with a romance plot, yes; but it's sold to an erotic romance publisher and to a readership that expects at least a nod in the direction of romance genre conventions, and I think that could be as much of an issue as the erotic content.

And it's self-perpetuating -- that's what I know I can sell, so that's what I write, and what I've had enough practice at to be good at writing. I've sold shorts to a couple of spec-fic markets which promptly up and died on me or lost the contract or both (fortunately markets which paid on acceptance rather than on publication). And at this point I'm completely out of touch with what's happening in current specfic, because I'm not reading very much of it.