July recap
By the numbers:
Stories out at the beginning of the month: 3
Acceptances received: 0
Rejections received: 1
Stories withdrawn: 1
Resubmissions: 2
New Submissions: 0
Stories out at the end of the month: 3
It’s been another slow month for the submission stats, with the same number of short stories out at the end of the month as there were at the beginning of the month. I received one rejection, which I turned around and sent to another market. And I had to add a new line above, for a withdrawn story. After sitting for six months at a market that did not respond to my queries, I chose to withdraw it. That story, also, has been turned around to a new market.
I had originally planned to work on novel revisions in July, but that didn’t really happen. I started working on it, ran into a roadblock, and then got lazy. So yeah, that’s still on my plate. I think I might actually need to let it sit for longer before I’ll be ready to revise it. I don’t think I’m ready to be ruthless with it, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to have to go.
In the meantime, I haven’t spent all of my July lazy. I’ve been working primarily on one short story, which is finally shaping up. I’m planning on finishing up my draft tomorrow, and then start letting some people read it. It’s due to a target market at the end of August, and I think I’m in good shape to get that done.
I’m also working on another round of revisions to one story, which I hope to have revised and out to another market next week. And then I’ve got another short story that’s nearly done, though it’s likely to require some cleaning up.
On top of that, I took over some of the day to day Mad Scientist Journal duties, mostly along the lines of emailing our authors contracts and edited stories. This is in an attempt to give Jeremy a bit more time to devote to his writing, as he’s got a couple of projects he SHOULD be working on.
And then there’s the approaching NaNoWriMo. I had two potential ideas on my plate, though I had more or less started to decide on one of them. And then, in the throes of poking at one of my campaign settings (a mashup between two series of books), I bemoaned the fact that it would be a great world to write in, if it weren’t highly derivative. Jeremy pointed out that all I really needed to do was to come up with my own world that included some of the characteristics that I really like about said campaign setting (one of which he defined as “Byzantine genealogy”).
So yeah, I’m world building. I need to sit down and make a map soon. And then figure out all of the fiddly bits, including the Byzantine genealogy. The good news is that one of the two book ideas I had will REALLY easily map onto this world I’m building, so voila. There’s my NaNo decision made.
Now I just have to get through all that world building in the next three months… and maybe write an outline while I’m at it. Always something to keep me busy.
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