Today I thought I’d write about what I have planned next, writing-wise.
I am almost finished my novella, This Monstrous Heart. I’m planning on submitting it to Neon Hemlock when they open for novella submissions in October. I still really like the story, but I will be happy when I’m able to work on other things. Longer pieces are so consuming. Every re-read, every complete edit, they take so much time. (This isn’t a complaint exactly, but it is so much more and quite different as a result.)
While I’ve been doing a story every day this month, I have confined myself to short first draft with minimal editing so as not to take away too much time from the novella.
So, next!
I have a story I’ve been working on for a while that I recently submitted for workshopping in a class I’m taking. The feedback was very useful and I’m going to work on getting this in shape to submit … somewhere. I guess it’s solarpunk-ish (solarpunk adjacent?), so I’ll try with those sorts of venues.
Also, I need to decide on what to do with the novella-prequel stories I’ve been writing this month. There are at least ten (although some cover the same ground from different angles). Rather than write another novella with them (or, god forbid, a novel), I think I might develop these as a series of interlinked short stories instead. At the moment that feels far more manageable!
I also want to look at the other proto-stories I’ve written this month, as well as other ideas I have kicking around, and decide which I want to work on first.
Pre-novella, I was trying to finish and submit two stories a month (not necessarily submitting the stories I had finished, but two each regardless). I want to return to that for the last three months of the year.
And I really need to take the time to review the finished-but-unpublished stories I have and see which I want to submit elsewhere and which I want to work on a bit more first (although that can be an endless preoccupation).
As well, my short story class continues through October and I am enjoying it a great deal, both the class part and the workshopping part. I feel both are so helpful in a complementary way.
I’m doing some more slush reading, starting on the 7th. I’m looking forward to that, too. It’s a themed submission call, so that will be interesting and different.
And I think that’s it for the coming months, at least for now. I will undoubtedly add more things as time goes on.
At the moment, I’m telling myself I’m not doing Nanowrimo in November, but I know how that goes! If I do it, I want to work more on short stories, although I have struggled with finding a way to ‘count’ that easily. (It works fine if I just write 50 000 words of first drafts, it doesn’t matter if they’re in short story form or a novel. But if I also want to include editing, it starts to get tricky. I need to give this some more thought.)
Oh! And blog posts. I like how this has gone. I can’t manage a post every 3 days most of the time, but I think my goal will be to post every Friday for October with a summary of what I’ve been working on (as much for my own sake as anyone else’s). Or maybe make sure I read something new to talk about each week. We’ll see.
That’s all for now. One more September blog post on the 30th.
Monique Cuillerier 