Sunday – 1/15/2012 – So a little late update, but there have been some delightful (read: sarcasm) changes to my everyday schedule, so my writing time has been a bit disrupted and unpredictable. Since it looks like it’s going to be the same for the foreseeable future, I’m adjusting my weeks to include weekends (so Saturday & Sunday may be used to complete a story which originally I’ve tried to finish by Friday). The rationale? I need more time to write. So! More likely than not, you’ll start seeing these diary updates on Saturdays or Sundays moving forward, though I’ll post them whenever a story for a week is finished.
I didn’t keep very diligent notes this week, but in the end, I did manage to finish the story. I was shooting for a 5k dark fantasy, and ended up with–still a dark fantasy-almost 11k story. This, I’m realizing very quickly, is something I am going to have to work on. Not only are stories above 7.5k much harder to place, they also commandeer a significantly larger chunk of my writing time, which seems to keep shrinking. I really need to get down to the 4k-5k range if I want to break into the fiction markets with any greater efficiency. It’s not that I haven’t sold stories that are 11.5k long–miraculously, I have–but it’s much more of an uphill battle, and I’d rather write an 11k novelette because I *want* to, not because that’s just how long my *short* stories run by accident. I need to move in to deliberate lengths, rather than “oops” lengths. Granted, a story will be however long it needs to be, but what that means is that I need to work on story conception and how many complications I put in/how many characters I want/how many scenes it’ll need to accomplish/etc. I’ve written 2.5-5k stories before, so I know I can do it. And I know I can come up with ideas that are still interesting even at that short of a length.
Either I need to shrink down, or I need to get bigger–I’m hedged in that demilitarized zone of 7.5k-25k. :( Too long to be a short story, too small to be a novel. *le sigh*
Maggie Slater 