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Writing and Publishing Fiction
Nearly serious fiction related diversions for the casual or more active writer.
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Obligatory Statistically Invalid Online Poll
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Three Sample Chapters. No more, no less. Three shall be the number,
and the number shall be three. Five is right out.
Being a submitter of unsolicited short story manuscripts that I could fold twice and fit in a #10 envelope, I had to do some research on this book proposal thing. What the book proposal should contain and the order that different sections should appear varied.
Throwing my hands up, falling well short of 50,000 word novel writing objective. In the waning hours of July Novel Writing Month, I was approximately 40,000 words short of the contest objective. In an act of desperation, I attempted to make up the difference with another gimmick.
Unpublished Guy's July Novel Writing Month Progress
I already exploited a loophole to rewrite a portion of one short story to meet the novel writing objectives. My thinking at that time was that if I manually rewrote the text then that should count as new words. Now, I am not sure if I need to make that distinction. After taking a second look at the FAQ, I decided that it wasn't necessary that I manually rewrite my existing writing. The FAQ addresses using an existing novel for the July novel. It doesn't say anything about short stories. If I asked for clarification, I would probably be told that existing short stories don't count to the word count any more than novels do, so I don't think I will ask. Instead, I will write with a mindset of blissful ignorance.
Unpublished Guy's July Novel Writing Month Progress
As you might have noticed, my word count has been in a bit of a holding mode. It didn't help that my bipolar, RAD, PTSD, ADD, ODD daughter poured coffee into my laptop on Sunday. (My first "Sorry for not posting but PC/laptop was in the shop" blog inactivity excuse.) Despite this setback, I have broken through the three word glass ceiling, and I have a graph to prove it.
Inspired by the John Gardner Art of Fiction exercise, "Write a long sentence," here is my latest post, a single sentence story, Now I Have a Title. (Am I ever going to shut up about John Gardner and the Art of Fiction? No, probably not.) Now I Have a Title
The fourth of July and four days into July Novel Writing Month. Four days of staring at a blank page wondering what font I should be using to write my novel. I settled on Verdana. I prefer sans serif, but it's not as overused as Arial.
Now that I have font selection settled, I have to figure out what the novel should be about. I suppose I could brainstorm, but I've decided to dredge up one of my older short stories and repurpose it as a novel length story. The particular story I had in mind was originally intended to be a multi-layered tome of symbolism like Moby Dick, except the source of my ambition was the epic poem, Jerusalem, by William Blake.
Some time ago, I signed up for July Novel Writing Month, which of course, is a writing contest identical to National Novel Writing Month, held in November. What are all of these novel writing months? The goal of these contests is to write a 50,000 word novel. The prize is having written a 50,000 word novel.
My specialty has been short stories, so this contest should be particularly challenging. I will be on a sabbatical of sorts as I focus my time and energy on this challenge. Don't worry, I will continue to post to Unpublished Guy, documenting my journey in the spirit of Captain Robert Scott's race to the South Pole and Sir John Franklin's 1854 Expedition to discover the Northwest Passage.
Also, expect to see several guest bloggers posting in their areas of writing and publishing expertise.
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.
To refresh my memory on the submission guidelines, I thumbed through my 2000 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market. (I don’t have a 2009 copy or 2008 or 2005, or anything else from this millennium for that matter. I have been out of the game you might say). In a nutshell, this is what the Novel & Short Story Writer's Market (Kuroff, Barbara. Writers Digest Books) had to say in 2000.
That’s a good question. Generally, I have always tried to publish my fiction stories in literary magazines. To identify likely candidates, I relied on the Writer's Market and the Novel & Short Story Writer's Market, two books that catalog a large number of print publications. The Writer’s Market covers fiction and nonfiction publications. Some good information about the publications is included in each.
The trick is to identify what publications where you would want to publish your work would be likely to want to publish your work.
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