Aeryn Rudel's Blog, page 37

A Week of Writing: 5/6/19 to 5/12/19

One more week of writerly endeavors.

Words to Write By

The quote this week comes from Robert Hass.

“It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”

– Robert Hass

This one sounds severe; I know. That said, I do feel like this a fair amount of the time. When I’m writing, it’s often an exercise of sheer will to keep writing, keep putting those words on the page no matter how much self-doubt and fear eat away at my resolve. It’s so easy to quit, to s...

A Week of Writing: 4/29/19 to 5/5/19

A day late, but here’s another week of writing wins and woes.

Words to Write By

The quote this week comes from Ernest Hemingway.

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”

– Ernest Hemingway

I’m featuring this quote not because I think it’s how everyone should write, but because it’s how I tend to approach writing. Hemingway is famous for spare, unadorned prose, and I tend to write in a similar fashion (note, I am not making any kind of qualitative comparison between my own writing and...

Submission Statement: April 2019

April is in the books, and here are all my submissions, rejections, and acceptances for the month.

April 2019 Report Card

Submissions Sent: 8 Rejections: 6 Acceptances: 1 Publications: 3 Submission Withdrawal: 0

That’s a decent month submission-wise. A reasonable amount of rejections against one acceptance and three publications. I give this month a solid B. April’s numbers give me thirty-six submissions for the year. A little off my pace for one-hundred submissions, but I’ve already fired...

Submission Protocol: For the Record

No doubt you’ve seen me post copious amounts of stats and analysis on this blog relating to my submissions, rejections, and acceptances. I’m able to do that because I keep track of every single submission I send and its outcome (plus a bunch of other details). You don’t have to be a stat wonk like me, but you should keep track of all your submissions. Here’s why.

Avoid dumb submission mistakes. Once you get into triple digits with submissions that comprise dozens of stories, it can be pretty...

A Week of Writing: 4/22/19 to 4/28/19

Seven more days down. Here’s the writing week that was.

Words to Write By

The quote this week comes from Louis L’Amour.

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

— Louis L’Amour

I come back to this quote a lot when I’m struggling with a story, a novel, or especially a novel revision. You see, the hardest thing for me is getting started. I have a tendency to build up whatever project I’m working on into this terrifying monolith of impossible work t...

The Random Rejection Generator v1.0

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know I like to have a little fun with rejections (it helps keep me mostly sane), and I’ve created a number of activities writers can do with their nos and not for us’s to make the process less heart-breaking. My last creation was Rejection Bingo, but this time I want to give authors the chance to create their very own rejections with my new Random Rejection Generator!

Here’s how it works. Just grab a six-sided die and roll it once for t...

A Week of Writing: 4/15/19 to 4/21/19

Another week in the books. Here’s how I did.

Words to Write By

The quote this week is another of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing.

Never open a book with weather.

If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.

– Elmore Leonard

I think Leonard meant this literally, in that it’s an old cliche best avoided, but I think there’s something else to be gleaned here from “The re...

Weeks of Writing: 3/25/19 to 4/14/19

Well, I fell behind on these again, so here’s a three-week catch-up of the weeks that were.

Words to Write By

The quote this week comes from Stephen King. 

“The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.”

– Stephen King

I’m kind of a fitness nerd, so likening the imagination (and the writing process) to a muscle that must be e...

Micromanagement: 4 Benefits of Writing Tiny

I’ve been writing Twitter microfiction under the #vss365 hashtag for roughly two months. This is my first experience writing at this very limited scale, and I’m finding it both fun and educational. I’m by no means an expert, but there is definite value in trying to cram a story into like 50 words. Here are a few of the benefits, as I see it, from writing microfiction.

Savage self-editing. One of the best parts of writing microfiction, at least for me, is how it forces you to be utterly bruta...

Submission Statement: March 2019

March has come and gone, and here’s how I did for the month.

March 2019 Report Card

Submissions Sent: 12 Rejections: 7 Acceptances: 3 Publications: 2 Submission Withdrawal: 1

Okay, this was a pretty good month. A dozen submissions is great, three acceptances is even better, and, hey, seven rejections isn’t too bad, especially since a couple of them were “good” rejections. I also had a couple of publications for the month, which I’ll link at the bottom of the post. I did have to withdraw one...