Tag: Writing

Write 1/Sub 1 check in: week 11, the one with even more stomach flu

Week 11! Oh! What a week. Everyone in the house, minus myself, came down with what we suspect was the norovirus. Seriously. They were all sick. I was not. This equation does not balance. Trust me.

Despite that, and the weather, I did manage to get a story written. One that came out of the blue (and yes, I’m calling it that), with characters and a world with the potential to recur.

Writing:

  • Out of the Blue, ~ 2,670 words
  • Untitled something-or-other, ~ 800 more words, in progress

Rejections:

  • The Madness in King’s End   

Submissions:

  • Land of the Free (Haircuts)
  • The Madness in King’s End 

Acceptances:

  • None

Write 1/Sub 1 check in: week 10, the one with snowstorms and stomach flu

Week 10! We’re into double digits, folks! Despite snowstorms and long commutes, and my daughter coming down with a nasty stomach flu, I conquered another Write 1/Sub 1.

This coming week I also want to work in some revisions, if for no other reason than I’m running out of stories for the submission half of the challenge. I have a handful of drafts and I hope to polish at least one of them up for the coming week.

Writing:

  • Untitled flash fiction, ~ 1,150 words: I’ll cut it down to about 1,000 words before I submit this. Some of those words are throat-clearing.
  • Untitled something-or-other, ~ 1,500 more words, in progress

Rejections:

  • The Patron Saint of Lost Things, this boomeranged back so fast, if I hadn’t ducked, I would’ve ended up with a concussion.  
  • Land of the Free (Haircuts), a narrative verse I sent out last year. 

Submissions:

  • The Patron Saint of Lost Things 

Acceptances:

  • None

Write 1/Sub 1 check in: week 9, the one with the even weirder prom date

Week 9! I worked on a longer story this week. (Novelette? Novella? Only time and word count will tell.) I was a little worried because I knew I couldn’t finish it during the week, but still needed my write 1. But Friday afternoon, while I was driving home in rush hour traffic, an idea hit me (kind of felt like that, too).

I made it home with the idea still in my head, jotted down what I needed to, and then wrote it up yesterday. This is how The Short, Sweet Life of My Invisible Prom Date was born. It includes the line:

Now, it probably doesn’t surprise you that there isn’t a patron saint of prom.

Writing:

  • The Short, Sweet Life of My Invisible Prom Date, ~ 1,600 words
  • Untitled something-or-other, ~ 3,000 words, in progress
  • Breaking the Unwritten Rules in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction assignment: 250 words class assignment

Rejections:

None this week. However, my submission tracker tells me I should be getting some soon. 

Submissions:

  • The Life Expectancy of Fireflies AKA the neck tattoo story. I’m not sure about this one, or its pretentious title, so I tossed it into a flash fiction contest. We’ll see what happens. 

Acceptances:

  • None

Published:

Do you hear what I hear?

Oh, you guys, you guys. You will not believe what I just discovered this morning, quite by accident (because sometimes, that’s how publishing works):

The Geek Girl's Guide to Cheerleading

That’s the audio version of The Geek Girl’s Guide to Cheerleading! Geek Girl! In audio! You can take her on your commute, download her to your Kindle–and who wouldn’t want to do that?

I listened to the sample and think they chose an excellent narrator. And then I listened to the very start on my Kindle and they totally said my last name correctly. (Three cheers for Audible!) It sounds so awesome to hear “… by Charity Tahmaseb and Darcy Vance.” I’ve listened to so many audio books that to have one is just amazing.

Write 1/Sub 1 check in: week 8, the one with the weird prom date

Week 8! Oddly enough, after I complained about last week’s ebb of creativity, I was struck with a story. Or rather, struck with a title and first line.

The title:

The Most Miserable Prom on Planet Earth

The first line:

My prom date is a space alien.

Despite its beginnings, it has no trace of science fiction or fantasy. Really. I scribbled down the title and that first line on Sunday, then wrote the story on Monday. I won’t say it came from nowhere, but it was unexpected. So considering how busy the week was, I got my writing and subbing in and I was quite pleased.

Writing:

  • The Most Miserable Prom on Planet Earth, ~ 2,000 words
  • Breaking the Unwritten Rules in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction assignment: 350 words on a dialogue scene

Rejections:

  • The Madness in King’s End But! This is a rejection-plus. I didn’t win the contest I entered it in, but the story was one of two honorable mentions. This pleases me immensely, since the contest was for mystery fiction, and this story is more mysterious than mystery.

Submissions:

  • The Madness in King’s End (and yes, I sent it right back out again)
  • It Only Takes a Minute (this one too from last week)

Acceptances:

  • None

Published:

  • Payment My “it doesn’t get much shorter than this” short story went live at Literary Juice. 

My ten-year-old’s bucket list

So in the class I’m taking over at The Loft Literary Center, Breaking the Unwritten Rules in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction, we’ve been talking about clichés and tropes, and about all those unwritten rules we might not even realize are holding us back from something original and startling.

We’ve discussed narration and how to balance entertainment with authenticity when writing a middle grade or young adult character. It reminded me of something Kyra said a while back.

One day after school, she mentioned she had something on her “bucket list.” After I got over my internal freak out about my ten-year-old having a bucket list, I asked her what she meant.

Here’s the thing: she’d never heard the phrase “kicking the bucket.” If she saw it in a story (or heard it in a movie) she would probably ask me what it meant if it wasn’t clear from context.

To her (and her friends), a bucket list represented a figurative bucket where they placed all the things that they’d like to do someday.

In Kyra’s case, this list includes:

  • being a scientist
  • traveling the world
  • painting all her pets’ portraits.

So, as writers, we’re told to avoid clichés because they’ve lost their freshness and meaning. But in some cases, all it takes is the next generation to give the old something new.

Write 1/Sub 1 check in: week 7, the one with all the rejections

Week 7! I’m hanging in there, although I must admit, I slowed down a lot this week, got all panicky, and then topped off my week with three rejections. However, I do feel stories and words gathering in the back of my mind. With a little luck, the ebb will soon be over.

Writing:

  • Lost and Found
    • Poem of this title
    • 100-word flash fiction of this title

Yes, it’s true. I wrote two very short, but different, pieces and gave them the same title. I. Was. Inspired. (Not.) Neither one may go out, but when I made this Write 1/Sub 1 pact with myself, I defined “write 1” as something I could potentially send out, not a scene or rambling words, or whatever. But, speaking of rambling words:

  • Breaking the Unwritten Rules in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction: 1,200 words on a character sketch assignment

Rejections:

  • Just a Matter of Time
  • It Only Takes a Minute
  • One Good Turn

Submitting:

  • Just a Matter of Time, back out it goes. Bye-bye!

Acceptances:

  • None

I’ve been waiting for this week to happen, by which I mean, the week where the flood of rejections came in and my creativity was at its lowest. From looking at my submission tracker, I knew I was (over)due for this sort of rejection storm. This is what happens, of course, when you submit something every single week–they come back, sometimes all at once.

Write 1/Sub 1 check in: week 6, the one with Girl Scout cookies

Week 6! Despite the 200 hundred boxes of Girl Scout cookies in my living room–that need a home that isn’t my living room–I had a very good writing week. Here’s what I did:

Writing:

  • It Only Takes a Minute, 247 words, for the Flash Fiction Chronicles String of 10 contest
  • The Weight of Secrets, short story of some length. I wrote it longhand and it’s still in my notebook, so I don’t know the exact word count.

Submitting:

  • It Only Takes a Minute, since I wrote it for the contest, why not actually submit it too?
  • The Madness in King’s End, to a local mystery contest. However, my story is probably more fantasy than mystery, so I’m not holding my breath on this one.

Rejections:

  • None!

Acceptances:

  • Payment, that even shorter (25 words) version of Cash or Check received an acceptance from Literary Juice for their Pulp Fiction section, where the story must be exactly 25 words with a one word title. (Now you know why I changed the title.) Oddly enough, it’s a story with a Girl Scout cookie theme.

Published:

I also started an online class this week at The Loft Literary Center,  Breaking the Unwritten Rules in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction. I’m all about the rule breaking. The next couple of weeks are going to be very busy, so this Write 1/Sub 1 thing may be more of a challenge. It’s like a cliffhanger–stay tuned to see if I can make it all work. 

Is Your Writing Stuck Because Your Brain has Plateaued?

I love this post from Rosanne’s blog. It captures one of the reasons I’m participating in Write 1/Sub 1 this year. Give it a read–as you can see, it applies to more than just writing.

rosannebane's avatarBane of Your Resistance

By Sean D’Souza

I’m delighted to introduce you to today’s guest blogger, Sean D’Souza, Chief Brain Auditor for Psychotactics. Sean is a fellow brain geek — fascinated by the human brain and able to translate what he discovers into engaging articles (as you’re about to see). He is the author of The Brain Audit—Why Customers Buy And Why They Don’t. Visit the Pyschotactics website for more articles by Sean including a free report on “Why Do Most Headlines Fail?”

As you read’s Sean article, consider how much of your writing resistance is caused by your brain plateauing…

Imagine you had thirty-three seconds to pick up a glass of water, take it across the room, and throw the water down the sink.

Could you do it?

Sure.

And you wouldn’t need more than ten seconds to do the task, especially if the sink isn’t very far away. Now give…

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