NaNoWriMo: Week 2

Posted on November 16, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

Week two of NaNoWriMo is over.  My writing got a little sporadic last week as some day-job items needed extra attention, but I managed to keep the NaNoWriMo pace.  Here’s an update on the word counts:

Nov 8—1,775 words
Nov 9—1,150 words
Nov 10—500 words
Nov 11—2,869 words
Nov 12—1,705 words
Nov 13—2,420 words
Nov 14—1,760 words
Week 2—12,179 words
Total words— 25,626 words

That averages to a pace of 1,830 words per day which puts me on target to write 54,900 words by the end of the month.  I’ve pushed past the halfway point of the novel, and I’m nearing the end of the second “act” (it’s a three-part novel). 

But enough basking in my promising progress, it’s time to get back to work.

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Reviewed in 8 Words

Posted on November 14, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

For Shakespeare, brevity was the soul of wit.  If that’s true, I recently received one of the wittiest reviews I will probably ever get.  This isn’t a complaint, mind you.  I appreciate when anyone takes the time to read one of my stories, and if they take the additional time to write anything about it—good or bad—even better. 

Reviewer “Blue Tyson” at Free SF Reader posted a synopsis and review of “Thief of Futures” last Monday (find it here).  Impressively, he captured everything he wanted to say in eight words:

“Collection agent target kid.  3.5 out of 5”

I do wonder if he got my story mixed up with another.  That’s not quite the way I would have summarized it (collection agent?).  I did get something a little more conventional than Richard Larson’s “The Ghost Party,” however, which garnered an even “wittier” synopsis and review: “Nightmare taco, 3.5 of 5.”   I admit I’m intrigued and a little jealous I didn’t get a synopsis like that.

The “3.5 of 5” seems to suggest something slightly above average—overall it appears that the September issue of Lightspeed Magazine got a good review.  Mr. Tyson writes, “Another fine issue at 3.63, again with assorted articles and short interviews.”

So thanks to Free SF Reader for posting a link to my story and giving me a few words.  If a few more readers find and enjoy my story as a result, I’m a happy author.

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“Clownspace” Finds a Place

Posted on November 12, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

My flash fiction story “Clownspace” has been accepted by 10Flash Quarterly for their January 2012 issue.  Each quarter they publish ten flash pieces (thus the publication’s title) around a theme; January’s theme will be: “The end of the world as we know it.”

So, yes, “Clownspace” is about the end of the world (of sorts)…and clowns…and surprisingly I don’t think it’s a horror story…unless you’re scared of clowns….

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National Short Story Week

Posted on November 10, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

Did you know it’s National Short Story Week in Britain?  I didn’t until fellow Hopefull Monster Terry Kidd alerted me to the fact.  National Short Story Week is an annual awareness event in Britain aimed at focusing attention on short stories and short story writers, publishers and events.  Being a short story writer, I think this is a great idea, and I encourage everyone to take time to read a short story a day for the rest of the week—they’re short after all!

You can learn more about the various events being conducted at the National Short Story Week website, including three online radio specials called The Write Lines, presented by Sue Cook, which will feature interviews with award-winning and best-selling writers about short stories, women’s fiction and children’s fiction.  If you need help finding a good story to read, try one from the recommended reading list or you can purchase a copy of “Women Aloud“, an audiobook of stories by top women’s fiction writers.  Or even better (from my perspective at least) check out one of my stories if you haven’t already read them all. 

It doesn’t matter what you read, just take twenty minutes or so to let your mind free and enjoy a moment away from reality.  Happy National Short Story Week.

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NaMoWriMo: Week 1

Posted on November 8, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

The first week of NaNoWriMo is in the books (where did the days go!), so I thought a quick update was in order.  In true NaNoWriMo style, it’s all about the word count, so here’s what I’ve written so far: 

Nov 1—2,479 words
Nov 2—1,821 words
Nov 3—1,783 words
Nov 4—1,943 words
Nov 5—2,240 words
Nov 6—1,124 words
Nov 7—2,057 words
Total (week 1)—13,447 words

I’m averaging 1,921 words/day, which puts me on pace for 57,630 words and what should be a finished first draft of my novel by the end of November.  Not all of the words I’ve written this week were good words.  Nor have they come particularly easily because I’m working through a tough stretch of the story where the character relationships are undergoing an evololution before the story moves into another sequence of rising action.  I knew this section would be challenging because most of what transpires is introspective, which I always find difficult to write in a first draft.  I know that I need to just get the words down and revise it later, so that’s what’s I’m doing (and what makes the NaNoWriMo approach perfect). 

So after one week, I’m on NaNoWriMo track.  Now I just need to keep plowing forward.

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How Many Times is Enough?

Posted on November 5, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

How many times do you submit a story before it sells?  The flippant answer is as many times as it takes to sell it.  In reality, that’s not such a flippant answer—it’s the truth—it’s just not particularly helpful.

I know people who trunk stories after only a few rejections.  If I gave up that easy, I wouldn’t have many sales.  Neither would Nebula-nominated writer Vylar Kaftan, who averages over six submissions before selling a story.  Ms. Kaftan has written two interesting, must-read, guest posts at the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) website.  One is a question answer about her submission habits and the other contains her submission history since about 2004.  If you’re an aspiring writer, or even and old pro, I recommend you check them out.

While I don’t have the same number of sales as Ms. Kaftan, here’s the number of times I submitted each of my nine published or forthcoming stories: 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12.  That averages out to 4.5 submissions for each sale.  Digging a little deeper into the numbers, there’s no relationships between the number of times submitted and the order in which I wrote them.  However, a relationship does exist between the type of sale (pro vs. semi-pro) and the number of times submitted, but I expected that because I generally exhaust the pro  markets before moving to the semi-pro ones.

So the take home message is don’t trunk your stories too soon.  Writing is about rejection, which for me is an average of about four rejections before I make a sale.  On occasions, those rejections can be considerably higher, as many as eleven “no thank yous” (so far, but bound to go up).  No one ever said publishing was easy (and the odds seem to support that), so if you want to publish, grow a thick skin, write, and submit and submit and submit and submit…

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Happy Birthday, Number 7,000,000,000

Posted on November 2, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

Yes, that number with all the zeroes is seven billion, as in seven billion people.  The United Nations estimated that human number seven billion was born October 31st.  That’s a startling number, and our global population growth is barely slowing down.  Way back in 1804, we had only one billion people on Mother Earth.  It took 123 years to get to two billion (1927), but then things sped up.  We hit three billion in 1960, four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987, and six billion in 1999.  Current projects have us topping eight billion sometime in 2027.

With limits to space and resources , where will we put eight billion people (not to mention our current seven billion)?  With a population that large, are we destined for a world of increasing scarcity and conflict?  With people as ornery as they already are, it seems continued population growth will only cause more local and global strife.  I wonder how much longer we can embrace short-sighted approaches like abstinence only education (for a scholarly article go here) and the refusal to promote sensible birth control around the world.  As Pogo aptly put it, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

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Time to Shift into High Gear

Posted on October 31, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

Tomorrow is the official start of National Novel Writing Month—or NaNoWriMo for the initiated.  The participants will attempt to write 50,000 words in the month of November.  I’ll be participating for the fourth time (unofficially—I’m not big on actually signing up for things like this), so I’ll need to kick up my writing word count from 500 words per day to nearly 1,700 words per day.  

Based on past, experience, that’s a tough haul, especially if unprepared, so I’ve been working on cleaning up the outline of the novel I want to finish (started in last year’s NaNoWriMo).  I should be good to go…I hope.  I’ll try to keep a steady flow of posts and updates here, but if I go quiet, it’s unlikely I was eaten by a shark, just buried alive under a mountain of words.

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The Instellar Autobahn

Posted on October 30, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about time, time travel, black holes, and traversable wormholes for the time travel story I’ve been working on.  While I’m not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, I admit to finding it all fascinating.  It’s gotten to the point that I’ve gotten lost in the research and, to some extent, forgotten about the story—d’oh! 

In my reading I’ve come across several interesting ideas that could make backdrops or key speculative elements in a number of stories.  The most interesting one I’ve found was from a gentleman named James Essig (you can find his equation-heavy site here) that postulated about building a tube that could “filter out all or nearly all zero point electromagnetic waves with a wavelength such that the nodes of the standing waves formed therein would fall on the inner wall of the tube.”  As I understand it, this would allow the speed of light to actually be greater inside the tube than in the “regular” universe, allowing faster travel between two points (from the point of view of an observer in the “regular” universe) without actually exceeding the speed of light.  

While we don’t have the technology to build a traversable tube like this, such a condition has been created in the lab—called the Casimir effect—so it seems this might be theoretically possible.  (Of course there are still the problems of mass/energy as an object accelerates closer to the speed of light, but let’s ignore that pesky issue.)  Imagine the galaxy spiderwebbed with an interstellar “autobahn” network built by a technologically advanced alien race.  Is the race still around?  Where do all of the “roads” go?  Hmmm…the story possibilities seem endless.

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“Thief of Futures” Beams Up

Posted on October 27, 2011 by D. Thomas Minton

This is a first for me…  Mr. Paul Cole at WRFR, community radio in Maine, emailed me about two weeks ago and asked if he could produce a podcast of “Thief of Futures” for his weekly radio show.  After talking with John Joseph Adams, editor at Lightspeed Magazine (to sort out some rights issues), it looks like Paul will be able to record my story!  Once complete, a podcast will be posted at Paul’s website, Beam Me Up!, and may also be syndicated as a forthcoming Lightspeed Magazine podcast (details still to be worked out, however).  I’m particularly excited because Paul has recorded Adam-Troy Castro’s “Arvies” (which recently won the Million Writers Award) as well as stories by Cory Doctrow, recent Hugo award winner Mary Robinette Kowal and numerous other “name” writers.  It’ll be cool to share space with such good company.

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