Last month, I found that having a very set schedule for posting here, with predetermined topics to write on, worked really well. Previously I have been far more vague (for example, deciding to write 2 blog posts per month, but without specifics) and then it just doesn’t happen.

So, I am going to be posting each week on Thursday about what I have been working on for the past week and anything else writing-adjacent that I feel like.

(I realize that I could turn this into a newsletter, but that feels like work — in the sense that I actually produce newsletters for work and I’d rather not do another at the moment.)

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What I’ve been working on

I completed another full edit (on paper) of the novella I’ve been working on since June and entered those changes into the electronic version. 

Once that was done, I debated with myself as to whether I wanted to do another on-screen edit before submitting, but ultimately decided against it. In the last edit, many of the edits were changes in word choice that were not particularly meaningful. (In fact, I think I changed back some of the edits I had made in the previous pass…) I was becoming a little concerned that I was going to start making things worse by fiddling unnecessarily.

So I wrote the cover letter (including a synopsis that I truly hope makes sense) and submitted it to Neon Hemlock on Wednesday.

From very first idea (thanks to Premee Mohamed’s Writing Sci-Fi Like A Scientist online class with Clarion West) to submission, it took almost exactly five months. The final version is about 21 000 words.

I don’t think I would have finished it so quickly (and efficiently, as it turned out) were it not for the novella accountability class I took with Kate Heartfield through Loft Literary over the summer which took me through the first 15 000 words.

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Now that the novella is off in the world, I can turn my attention back to shorter stories. There are three I am currently focused on.

Dispersed: I submitted this story for workshopping in the class I’m currently taking with Cat Rambo and now I’m integrating the (incredibly useful) comments I got. 

An earlier, somewhat different version of the beginning of this story (with a different title) was a Critique Week story last year with the Story A Day Superstars group. I’ve been working on it, on and off, for a while now. I think I have changed almost everything now except the setting and the broadest interpretation of the plot, but it is definitely much closer to what I want.

There’s still laundry: This is a Story a Day story from just last month, a lighthearted story about the underworld. I think it will end up being rather short, maybe 1200 words. I really like how the setting has developed.

Then there’s what I am tentatively calling Generation Pothos. This started out as an idea for themed submission call, but what I was writing wasn’t quite right for it. It’s about a generation ship that is not going to reach its intended destination. The twist is that most of the library and electronic files that would have told them about Earth and everything else were lost and all they know about (or the only thing they know a great deal about) is plants.