Let’s start with a little writing contest news. Late in the month, after I had written the August update, I stumbled upon a flash fiction writing contest. I decided at the last minute to give it a shot. nycmidnight runs several writing contests a year. For this challenge, we had 48 hours to write a 500-word story. The real difficulty is that you don’t get your assignment until midnight on Friday. The assignment includes a genre, an action, and an object. My group assignment was a suspense or thriller story that included opening some else’s mail and nail polish. Despite a glaring, horrendous error in my story that I did not catch until the day after the deadline, I think it came out well. I’m not used to contest writing, but I am hopeful that I make it through the first round so I can do a better job. Even if I don’t advance, it was a fun challenge. Once I am allowed, I will post my story on my Writing page.
Next is my submission for We Suck at Comics, Volume 2. I’m thrilled with the story and my decision to utilize an epistolary structure to tell it, but the amount of work it entails is much more than what I realized! It’s become as much of an art project as a literary one, and my wife and I have been working hard at it, trying to get the look just right. She’s writing some of the letters for me to help give the two characters a different writing style. We’ve been “aging” paper and searching for the right look, but hopefully we’ll be done soon. And I still don’t have a title!
My ten thousand word fantasy story is nearly complete. I wanted to have it done by the end of the month, but I am still making adjustments to get under the maximum word count and re-working part of the ending. I wrote in a previous post that I wrote this story without my usual intense amount of planning, and that includes not having a clear idea of what the underlying message of the story was. Now that I have read it through a few times and gotten feedback from a couple of people, I have gotten down to the core idea of the events and am working to tighten up some spots so I can expand upon some others. Hopefully, this will be done before by busy weekend in October (I’ll write about that in a forthcoming post).
Lastly, my YA book series is moving slowly along. The edits for book one are nearly done, though I think it will need another round to help trim some spots. I made a change to one of the minor characters, as I decided he will be recurring (still in a minor role) in at least one or two of the other books, so I wanted to bring him into more focus in book one. I’ve been working on the outline for book two and that’s shaping up nicely. Now that I have a good grasp on the story and the events, I have begun my next phase, which is to start my dialogue pass through the first few chapters. What’s a dialogue pass, you ask? Do not fear, I am working on a blog post about this which I should be publishing here soon.
NaNo Write Month is quickly approaching, so my goal is to have as much of the dialogue pass done as possible so I can get to actually writing book two in November. I have thanked and praised NaNo for its help in getting me to be more productive, and since book one began (and finished) as a November project, it seems only fitting that book 2 begins the same way. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, here’s a link to their site. If you’ve ever wanted to write a book of any kind, I suggest trying it out.
What’s that? How come I never refer to the YA series by name? Oh, that’s easy. It doesn’t have one yet. Well, it does, but I am hesitant to use it. Titles exist in a weird limbo for me – I either have the title in mind the entire time, or I agonize over it for an eternity.
Well, that’s it for now. October is here, and with it comes the beginning of work on a new book. I’m almost done with all my editing, so the spooky month will be one that sees me returning to doing something write. (I’ll stop that nonsense after this year. Maybe.)