[Previously: Week 1 Review, Week 2 Review, Week 3 Review]

The fourth week of the challenge has ended. Here’s an update:

• I spent the week editing one of my short stories, and in that time the form and shape of the story has danced around a good bit. I’m currently starting the second round of editing (I guess you would call this Draft #3?), and I feel like it is settling down into something coherent and logical. Who knows if it’ll stay that way as I trudge on, but the great thing is this: I think it’s getting better. Time will tell if it ever ends up good, but it’s encouraging to see it is at least pointing in that direction and not the other way.
• As I laid out in last week’s post, I plan on eventually submitting these stories to publishers. I would say that I don’t know what to expect, but that would be a lie: I expect I’ll be rejected continuously for the foreseeable future. I’ve seen too many interviews with wonderful authors telling of the many years trying to get anything accepted to have much hope for the near-term. All the same, I plan on keeping you informed of my manuscripts’ journeys from the submission box to the trash heap.
• In fitting with these goals, I’ve done a little homework at the library this week. I went through the last four years of The Best American Short Stories, which if you don’t know is a great anthology series of stories published the prior year, and I tallied up the magazines and journals where these stories (and the list of “notable” stories in the back of the book) were published. So now I have a list of some ~120 or so places that could conceivably publish my stories (Ok, fine–The New Yorker ain’t never going to publish me).
• Here’s an interesting development: I’ve stopped timing how much I write every day. And here’s a related story why: One winter in college, I trained to run a marathon. I’m the kind of guy that gets really into numbers: I planned out my mileage week by week, wrote down my run times, optimized, dialed everything in. And you know what happened? A little more than a month before the race, I burned out after a 19 mile training run. My body was shot. My knees ached. I had pushed it too hard, driven to maintain a satisfying string of numbers in a spreadsheet. I never made it to the starting line. Since then, I’ve learned to run without a watch. To not calculate precisely how many miles my run is. To run by feel. And last week I realized that such an approach is probably also best for my writing: writing by feel, not to flesh out a quota, whether words or time. Which isn’t to say I plan on writing less or giving up on discipline, just that I tend to tip the other way into achievement obsession – and that is what I need to guard against.

 

One. More. Day.

The Darn Ecologist

[Previously: Week 1 Review, Week 2 Review]

The third week of the challenge has ended. Here’s an update:

• For the third week of the challenge, I wrote fiction for 33 hours and 23 minutes total or 4 hours and 46 minutes per day.
• So far in the challenge I’ve written complete first drafts for 6 short stories (list of story prompts here).
• I’ve almost made it to my goal of 35 hours of writing or writing-related activity (e.g. editing) per week. Initially, I thought 35 hours was a pretty ambitious goal, but it hasn’t been too difficult actually. The hardest part is starting to write. Once I get going, it’s pretty easy to put in a few hours. The focus for Week 4 will be to emphasize maintaining this amount of writing.
• I think it ended up being a good idea to stop writing blog posts every day, because that extra hour really was funneled into other productive (and more enjoyable) writing. With that in mind, my next update will be in another week.
• I’ve noticed that after the first week to 10 days, and after I had completed a few stories, that I have settled down into a natural routine. I’ve figured out ways that work for me to 1) brainstorm/outline story ideas, 2) get into “writing mode”, and 3) structure/schedule my day consistently (←if I have a hard time one day, this is probably the reason).

For the next week, I’m going to go through and start revising my stories. My current thinking is that I would like to cycle through revising, writing, and submitting on a rolling basis. So for instance, if I have 6 first drafts written, I would go back and revise/edit story #1 and get it ready to submit to a publisher. When it’s ready, send it off to some place. Then write the first draft to a new story (story #7). (Then start revising/editing story #2, etc.)

This strategy should allow me to switch back and forth between revising and writing new material, so I don’t get stuck in a rut with either one and I keep both skills in practice. It also should allow a nice delay of a few weeks between writing and revising the same story, so I’ll be revising each story with “fresh eyes”. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, because this strategy is a continuous process, there won’t be long periods of down time.

It would also mean that I’d constantly be sending my work out for others to read, which is probably a good thing, especially considering how much rejection I’ll likely be facing. Mentally, I think it is important to be working on the next thing when a rejection comes… it keeps you looking to the future.

At least, that’s the idea. We’ll see!

The Darn Ecologist