Writing Wednesday – One Step Back…

Sometimes writing is a case of backward motion before moving ahead, and this last week was like that.

Writing Wednesday is where I basically admit publicly how much – or how little – progress I’ve made over the last week. It’s my attempt to keep myself focused through the power of public shame, and so far, so good.

Also, I try to list various open calls for submission I hear about. Share the love.

The Novel:

Well, the good news is I think I added 3,000 words to a potential prologue or first chapter of a new book. The bad news is those words came from Triad Blood.

See, I’d written an epilogue that wasn’t sitting well with me. It was more-or-less a teaser about what might happen next, but the more I looked at it, the more I disliked it as a kind of a tacked-on cliffhanger teaser type chapter that didn’t really mesh well with the end of the story I’d told in the book proper.

So I cut it.

The magic thing is that I managed to add words over-all, but the unfortunate reality was that subtracting 3,000 words was a tough hole to crawl out of from a word count point of view, and I didn’t get much further ahead overall in the grand scheme of things.

I can definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel, though. I’ve started a “once more with feeling” go-through where I’m going in order, chapter by chapter, and making my list of what I’ve still got to flesh out form my square-brackets method of writing past scenes that didn’t flow right on demand. I’m good.

Short Stuff:

I have not submitted anything for May yet, though I have a flash short fiction piece I’m almost happy with. Shouldn’t be an issue this month.

Open Calls I know about:

Ink Stained Succubus – quite a few different calls, including M/f, F/m, M/M, and lots of different genre calls; earliest deadline is May 15th, 2015.

Queers Destroy Fantasy – from Lightspeed Magazine; deadline June 1st, 2015.
The Biggest Lover – Big-Boned Men’s Erotica for Chubs and Chasers; first draft June 1st, 2015; deadline July 1st, 2015.

Defying Doomsday – apocalypse-survival fiction with a focus on disabled characters; deadline July 1st, 2015.

Unconventional Love – Short romantic fiction that revolves around attending a convention; deadline August 31st, 2015.
Bi Guys – Firsthand Fiction for Bisexual Men and their Admirers; synopsis September 1st, 2015; deadline October 1st, 2015.
Covalent Bonds – Geeks in Love; deadline December 15th, 2015.

Other places to always check include the Lambda Literary Calls of Submission page.

Heard of any good calls lately? Pop ’em in the comments.