Aeryn Rudel's Blog, page 10

Novellas by the Numbers

I recently had a novella published by Grinning Skull Press called Effectively Wild, and I’m currently writing a follow-up novella. I’ve also written novellas for Privateer Press in their steampunk fantasy setting of the Iron Kingdoms. Since I’m focused on novellas right now, I thought I’d talk a little about how I go about writing them as opposed to writing novels. Of course, there’s no right way to do this. What follows is how I approach fiction between 20,000 and 40,000 words. You might have a...

Effectively Wild Launch Day & Other Weird Baseball Stuff

Today, my baseball horror novella Effectively Wild launches in print and e-book. Be a friend, and head on over to Amazon or your online book retailer of choice and grab a copy.

Okay, now let’s have a little fun. While you don’t need to be a baseball aficionado to enjoy Effectively Wild, the novella is sprinkled with the colorful jargon that pervades the sport. It’s all very clear through context, but I thought it would be fun to give folks a little baseball jargon glossary. Some of these terms a...

The Accidental NaNoWriMo

November is on the horizon, and that means thousands of writers are preparing to jam out 50,000-word novels in a month as part of NaNoWriMo. I’ve never done an official NaNoWriMo, but I keep meticulous records of how much I write per day when drafting a novel. I thought it might be interesting to look at the first draft timelines for four of my novels and see how they stack up against the NaNoWriMo pace.

These numbers and dates are for first drafts only. For the first three novels, there were, o...

Submission Statement: September 2022

September was a pretty good month on a number of fronts.

September 2022 Report CardSubmissions Sent: 9Rejections: 6No Response: 0Acceptances: 1Publications: 2Further Consideration/Shortlist: 0

I sent a solid number of submissions out in September. Those nine subs bring me up to seventy-on for the year, which puts me within reach of my goal of one hundred. One acceptance and a couple of publications make it a pretty good month. Six rejections is not that many, though one of them was a rea...

The Awful Agony of Almost

I have reached a point in my writing career where the majority of short stories I write accumulate further consideration and close-but-no-cigar rejections from pro markets. I have three stories circulating at the moment, each with a minimum of three such rejections. In this post, I’m going to talk a bit about this particular brand of no, what it might mean, and how my perception of it has changed over the years. As always, this is NOT an attempt to call out publications or editors or anything of...

Submission Statement: August 2022

August was somewhat disappointing, mostly because I’ve fallen behind on my submission goal.

August 2022 Report CardSubmissions Sent: 8Rejections: 7No Response: 0Acceptances: 0Publications: 0Further Consideration/Shortlist: 2

More submissions than last month, though most of those went in the last week. Clearly the other numbers weren’t as good. That may have something to do with the number of stories I had/have pending. Generally, I’ll have a round a dozen. I got down to four (and one is ...

The Hook Up: Yet More Fun With First Lines

A blog topic I keep coming back to is analyzing the first lines of my flash and short stories. As before, all this comes from the essay written by Stephen King called “Great Hookers I Have Known” in his now sadly out-of-print collection Secret Windows. The term “hooker” comes from an old bit of publishing slang that means a first line that hooks the reader. Over the years, I’ve been looking at the first lines of my published stories, rating them, and trying to find evidence that supports the the...

Three Things I Learned as a Magazine Editor

From March of 2010 to September of 2013, I was the editor-in-chief of Privateer Press’s in-house magazine No Quarter. I directly produced twenty issues (plus two special editions) as EIC and then another ten or so after I was promoted to publications manager (though the magazine had a new EIC at that time). Anyway, I’ve written about my first issue here, so I thought I’d write about my final issue as EIC and what I learned as a magazine editor.

Though I didn’t plan it this way, it was cool to go...

Three Things I Learned About Writing Media Tie-In

Today, I’m going to talk about writing media tie-in fiction for tabletop gaming companies. I actually know a thing or two about that because I’ve worked both sides of that particular fence. My last position in the industry was as a managing editor for a media tie-in fiction line, and I still write a lot of media tie-in for my former employer.

If you’ve never heard the term media tie-in, it’s fiction based on a pre-existing IP whose primary expression is in another medium, with movies, games, and...

Three Things About Writing Media Tie-In

Today, I’m going to talk about writing media tie-in fiction for tabletop gaming companies. I actually know a thing or two about that because I’ve worked both sides of that particular fence. My last position in the industry was as a managing editor for a media tie-in fiction line, and I still write a lot of media tie-in for my former employer.

If you’ve never heard the term media tie-in, it’s fiction based on a pre-existing IP whose primary expression is in another medium, with movies, games, and...