Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Wednesday Weekly

This week in the Guiniverse:

BODIE'S MEN WIP: 3,746 Holding steady at 3,746. All my effort this week went to SHARDS. I was also thinking, it might be helpful if Bodie had a bit more of a plot to work with...

SHARDS OF GLASS WIP: 70,397 words. So this week, I wrote another 7,591 words.  For me, this is pretty epic - three times my weekly writing goal!


I also outlined two short stories that I don't feel like I have time to write. One is a dystopian piece about a boy coming of age in a society that operates strictly according to religious law -- whatever religious law you choose when you're eighteen.  Of course, that's what I think it's about; I haven't written it yet, so we'll see.  I love writing short stories, but a) the novel takes up all my attention and b) where the hell do I market them? I've had more luck getting my poetry to see the light of day than short stories.  Since I tend to write about teenager or college-age characters, I wish Seventeen and their ilk still published short stories as they did in the good old days (which were long before I was a teenager, but I've read some of them, and they used to have some quality fiction).

Anyway, I love my short stories even if all they do is bum around my house watching MTV and drinking all the pop in the fridge, so I'll have to make the time to flesh those two out. It's always comforting just to have the ideas on the page, though. Otherwise I wake up freaking out at 2 am because I somehow realized, in my dreams, that I had a great plot idea and then I lost it (I'm not crazy, okay? I'm a writer).


In other writing-related news, I have my very first beta reader, thanks in large part to Roni over at Fiction Groupie and her excellent post about beta readers. I opened my email to a new manuscript to read this AM, so I get to start critiquing, and I'm looking forward to feedback -- more on this all as it progresses. In fact, I need to send her my (very very rough please remember) draft now.


On the reading side: I feel like I have a lot of half-finished books right now. I think the only thing I actually finished this week was Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers. Not my favorite YA book of all time, but engaging. Honestly, I found myself looking up at my husband from time to time to ask, "Is this really how anyone's high school experience goes?"  This book is about some unbelievably brutal bullying. Now, I was bullied a little (and I'm pretty sure bullied myself at times, shhh, we won't talk about that), but it was never that intense. Perhaps this just means that I'm fully a grown-up now and forgetting what childhood was like? :p


2010 100+ Books Challenge/50 Books Library Challenge:
8/100
8/50

(Links for the reading challenge posts are, as always, at the bottom of the blog)

6 comments:

Valerie Geary said...

Check out duotrope.com!!!! Best place to look for short story markets!! And you can keep track of where you send them. I use that website all the time and I love love love it! (You can also look for places to submit poetry too...)

Dawn Simon said...

Good for you, tripling your weekly writing goal! Your short stories comment made me laugh.

That Roni--she's awesome. It's great that you're getting and giving critiques. Exciting and so beneficial! I not only learn from critiques I receive, but from editing other people's work

Shannon O'Donnell said...

I agree with Dawn. She took my comments, Guinevere - I'm telling mom! Ha ha. :-)

Guinevere said...

Valerie -- thanks for the suggestion! It's been recommended before, and yet somehow I keep forgetting to check there for homes for my short stories (and poetry, too). I need to get to work!

Dawn and Shannon, I'm excited about the critiquing... I always learned a lot from my crit group when I was in one (like you said, Dawn, partially from from editing others, but also from hearing criticisms I wouldn't have picked up on), but I think it's going to be a little different doing one-to-one crits via web! It should be an interesting new challenge.

Kimberly Franklin said...

WOW! You really got a lot done this week. Puts my measly 2k on my MS to shame.

Good job!

Guinevere said...

Kimberly, I get a lot more done when I leave my house with all the distractions and go to a coffee shop on the weekends... that's where the bulk of that word count came from!

The problem, of course, is that I'm probably spending more on lattes than I'll earn when I sell my book. :p