Writing and Publishing Fiction

I may not have mastered the Art of Fiction.
I have mastered the Art of Cheap Starbucks Coffee.

photo by Pitel

Last week I was pondering what contests I should enter this month, and I created a short list of 24 writing contests based on due date and topic or genre of the contest.

This week I'll need to determine a basis for evaluating the remaining contest candidate and narrowing the list to 2 or 3 finalists. Since I am being shallow, I can think of no better criteria than calculating the ROI (that's return-on-investment in business parlance).

Does Entering Fiction Contests Feel Like Playing the Lottery?
photo by Jeffrey Beal

Last week I announced that I would rework the incomplete novel that resulted from July Novel Writing month to enter a short story contest. I could take one of two approaches to begin this task. I could be true to the vision of the artist and complete the story first and then shop around for a suitable contest. Alternatively, I could take the shallow route by selecting a fiction contest first and then rewrite the fiction to improve the chances of winning that particular contest. I'll be taking the shallow route.

Dear—you don't mind if I call you dear do you? Whether you are following William Blake, the self publisher, or Dr. Zaius, publishing fundamentalist, you will want to promote your fiction. If you are self-publishing or subsidy publishing, you will quickly find yourself in street fight brawl. Oh my, you will need to bust knees with a pipe and deliver a proper beat-down with a heavy chain, to get noticed. No one else is going to help you when you are lying in the street in a pool of your own blood, because you came ill-equipped with the marketing tools necessary to survive in the world of self-publishing.

As I have mentioned before, the downfall of past fiction efforts has been an overly designed approach. I have written and completed a handful of short fiction stories using this approach, and some of them have turned out OK; however, I have not yet published a fiction story.

Recently I was inspired by Richard Dreyfus, and decided that I would create my own method of writing fiction (short story or novel), the Mashed Potato Method of Writing a Fiction Story.

You are about to read an online article by an Unpublished Guy, Fiction Novels, a Profile of Italo Calvino. You crouch in front of the computer screen and use the pointing device to select the Read More link.

What do you think a pigeon would taste like? Would it be dark meat or white meat? Do they fly as much as ducks or geese? That would mean dark meat. Do they mostly walk around on sidewalks and window ledges? Then perhaps some white meat.

The stereotype of the starving artist has discouraged many potential fiction writers. In a biography about the science fiction writer Philip Dick, I read a story about his starving writer period when he was cranking out potboilers. According to the story, he was taking pot shots at pigeons on his window ledge for food.

From an early age I read voraciously and wanted to be a writer. When I was younger, I read a lot of stories by science fiction authors like Philip Dick. I took a creative writing course in high school, and thought that I would take the fiction writing path.