Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 55

CLARKESWORLD!

And it's up!

I've also send "King of Pine" out again.

And the Hits Keep Coming

"A Corpse from a Swan," my attempt to turn a venerable ballad into a money-making opportunity for some miller's daughter is going to Jabberwocky!

And now for emotional whiplash

It appears that, though I did manage to soldier through last week's data-entry hell, I either screwed up or accidentally deleted from my schedule ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE (well, everything else with high visibility), and now the people upstairs are screaming for my blood.  I might just pull a write-up out of this, and worse, I might have pissed off the developers.  I wish I could say that I could dispute their claims, but no, I fucked up. 

It looks like I just sold "Pony" to Clarkesworld.

This was the market I was absolutely certain I would never crack.

All I feel right now is I need to do this more.  I need to write more, better, because now I know I can write well enough to get in, that "Bufo Rex" and "Turnipseed" were not flukes.  Actually, I think "PONY" is a better executed story, but then, it's not 4 years old, either, so who really knows?  Well, anyone other than me, really, but that's not the point.  The point is that I know and believe that I can write well enough to sell to pros on purpose.

That's huge.

Not to Put to Fine a Point on it.

It bears repeating that submitting work to people I know and trust for no money is not the same thing to me as submitting to a non-paying market.  That's working with friends.  A dangerous thing, sometimes, if communication is lacking, but different.

Also, that charity work is charity work. 

Markets that do token payments are fine with me too.  They pay.  Not a lot, but then even the pros don't pay a lot.  There is no lot in fiction writing, unless you're Uncle Stevie. 

I'm always happy and grateful to work with the people I trust, even if the profits are paltry.  If I got into this gig for money, I'm a damned fool.

Hells Yeah, Stone Telling!

In case 40 people haven't already told you: STONE TELLING.

I am picking my way through it now.  It's wonderful.

One More Day?

Right, so the postmortem - what did I actually learn about myself as a writer from all of this:

1) Do not submit to non-paying markets.

2) My stated philosophy regarding work I've submitted and editors is that I trust the editor, and if they want to make changes, that's, well, their job.  I wasn't aware of the limits of that philosophy.  I am now.  Well, I am aware of what lies outside of my limits.

3) That if something experimental is going to be done with my work, I want to do it. 

4) That I actually do know what I want to say, and that it's important to me to say what I want to say, and that I write for myself a lot more than I thought. 

The Conclusion of the Clone Saga

The Spider story has been taken down from Coffinmouth; the staff there was quite gracious about it, and I don't fault them for not taking it down over the weekend, I find that quite understandable.  I have learned a thing or two about myself as a writer, as well, things which will be valuable going forward. 

There are worse things than rejections in the depths

First order of business, another bounce on King of Pine.  It has officially reached the point where I doubt it.  But that is by no means the worst of it.  The worst has nothing to do with that but with another story.

I submitted a story to Coffinmouth, the spider story. When I did so, I did it as my first and last and only submission to a non-paying market, just because. The story was, to the best of my knowledge, trunk-bound. It had a lot of flaws but it had some neat ideas and a voice I enjoyed. I had fun writing it. I had fun rewriting it so it made some sense. I submitted on a lark.

Come all ye young authors, and hear my sad tale.

The editor ran it through a cut-up engine. Added his own lines to it and made it unrecognizable as the story I wrote. Voice, without which the story isn't, was obliterated. What became of my story is on this Wordpress zine still, though I have asked to withdraw it (in all fairness, I was given 24 hours, possibly, given the gmail outages - the email was sent at 2 p.m. yesterday, but did not appear in my inbox until start of work this morning; granted, there was nothing in that email saying the site would go live 24 hours after the proofs came out, but what the hell).

Anyway, the moral of this story is in the subject line; avoid non-paying markets, even on a lark. Coffinmouth in particular.

And We Could See the Stars

I can do other things now that I have escaped from data-entry hell.
Just not today.