Monday, December 8th

The Daily Report

Two things happened over the weekend: one is that I posted a bonus story on Tales of MU, filling in a bit of alluded-to historical and cosmological background. The other is that I announced an end of year fundraising push. My goal here is to make enough money to start the new year on firmer ground. The way I figure it, for $500 I can take care of some immediate pressing needs and get some of my necessary monthly services switched to cheaper annual subscriptions. For $1,000, I can do that, and also end up with a month's padding on everything so I'm not scraping money together on a week-by-week and month-to-month basis. Anything more than that is gravy, just added security.

What I do takes a lot of focus and emotional energy. Being broke or on the verge of broke all the time uses up a lot of focus and emotional energy. I love to throw 110% of myself into everything I do, but worrying about money and health and family stuff uses up about 70 or 80%. Now, some things are always beyond our control, but money doesn't have to be one of them.

So if you've enjoyed my work throughout the current year and you're eager to see what I can do in the next one, you can help out by giving your friendly global neighborhood crowdfunded indie author a Christmas tip.

The State of the Me

Okay. I keep staying up later than I mean to, but I'm sleeping well, as I often do in the colder months.

Plans For Today

This week I'm fitting back into the schedule that worked so well in the weeks before my previous Florida trip: Monday, I get my ducks in a row concerning what I'm going to be writing/posting in Tales of MU, and the subsequent days I'm threshing out a chapter a day, which will then be expanded/polished revised in the drafts folder until the days they're due to go up.

Well, that's one waiting game over.

I just got a response from Strange Horizons regarding my submission of a very long short story called "Inside, Looking Out." My newsletter readers got to see an earlier draft of the story, though I don't think it had that title yet. If you're reading my newsletter, you probably know the one. The one about the windows.

I have a hard time being disappointed. First, I know that Strange Horizons is not a horror market. While I didn't write this as a horror story, the comments of the people I shared it with suggested it might be received as one. I also knew this story rubbed right up against the upper limit of stories they will consider, and exceeded their preferred length by 4,000 words. According to their guidelines, a story has to be very good to be accepted at that length. Given the overall quality of stories that Strange Horizons publishes to begin with, that's a very high bar indeed.

Crossed Genres is doing a "novellete" themed issue in 2015. I think that will be the next place I try it, though since the story's current length is at the low end of what they're looking for instead of the high end, I think I'm going to... unlace the corset a little, give a little more attention to a relationship present in the framing device of the story that kind of got short thrift in the version I submitted to Strange Horizons.

Even before I submitted it, though, I was thinking about doing more with the idea. Believe it or not, this story began life as an idea I thought would make for an interesting piece of flash fiction. My first draft ended up too long for that, but also very dry and sterile. I humanized it by framing it as a story one person tells another, the personal revelation of one person trying to help another make sense of her life.

This is the element of the story that I think could stand to be expanded. And while the novelette length would give me some more breathing room, even while I was wrapping up the 9,000 word version, I was thinking about whether or not it would be better served as an actual novel, with the framing story unfolding over multiple days and dates, and the story within a story interspersed as the storyteller opens up more to the narrator. This would give the reader more time to become attached to the two characters, and the narrator more space to react to and reflect on the amazing story she's being told.

So while I'm still planning on shopping the long-short story around as opportunities to do so present themselves, I'm really thinking this is going to end up being a novel.