Timewaster's Guide Archive

Hey, 5000 words a day from here on out and it's still entirely doable.

(I keep telling myself that. Since I've only GOT 5000 words so far.)

Ow!

But Karl, I don't WANT to!

Whee.

Let's see. I'm a full-time undergrad who double majors in English and Creative Writing. I work mostly with fiction, and my long fiction is pretty much exclusively fantasy. (Of course, my "long" works consist of an 11k word novella, a novel that's halfway through, and two novels that I have yet to write.) I used to think of myself mostly as a novel writer but lately I've become enamoured of the short story form, as well. A lot of my short stories aren't fantasy at all, but tend towards liter- umm, something that is not literary fiction, because to say that myself would be pretentious.

I'm doing NaNoWriMo for the first time this year, using it to work on my current novel, which you guys probably won't be seeing, because the first eight chapters have already been workshopped to death and need significant revisions, and it would be silly to give you chapter nine. I will be getting started on another novel in December (here's hoping I can finish the first one first, don't really want to be working on two at once) that's related to the novella I mentioned before, and some of that you guys might end up seeing. Until then it'll probably be short stories from me.

I also do some songwriting and playwriting. In fact, a couple of my major projects this year will be a musical (hopefully) and a story album thing. If I knew more about those, I'd tell you. I have a lot of work to do

As for WHY I write what I write, genre-wise? I have no idea. I just tend to go with whatever fits the story best, and lately I'm finding that I have some things to say that don't have to be speculative fiction, which is why so many of my stories end up as, umm, mainstream fiction.

I think that's a good goal to hold ourselves to, yes. I don't think we should make it "if you don't do it you get kicked out of the group" (unless it becomes obvious that somebody's sandbagging) but I think that in most cases that should be a fairly reasonable amount of time.

I would say that the ONE time we ought to give ourselves any deadlines, as such, is if somebody's preparing a piece for submission to an anthology with deadline X (or whatever). It seems to me that if someone's looking to shop an MS and they're themselves running on a deadline, they should be able to let us know and we can then make a point of doing that person's first, or whatever.

Okay, I'll sign you up for just critiques for the moment then Rose.

I don't think we should put a limit on the time frame we have for getting critiques to people. Obviously the sooner the better but frankly, for our later submissions (the December ones don't concern me, because I'll be out of school) I will have a LOT of trouble giving people the critiques they deserve if we have to do it within two weeks or whatever. A deadline like that will also make the number of people we critique every time look a LOT more daunting.

Flo - I'll sign you up as just a critiquer for the moment, rather than for a submission deadline. Rose, did you say you wanted to submit on the 15th, or just wanted to help critique for now? Sorry, I forget.

I think Chaos had it right - our best bet is to wait and see how things work out before we start banging our heads over the problems that we might potentially run into someday. I think there will be pros and cons to any strategy we use, such as alternating groups or whatever, but heck. We're just getting started here. Let's just burn that bridge when we get there.

Yeah, essentially we're splitting that reading list into two groups - everybody still reads everybody's stuff, but some of us will submit on the first of each month and some of us will submit on the fifteenth of each month.

Ideally we'll have a half and half split, but right now we've only got 3 or 4 people submitting on the 1st, which means we'll have like 11 people submitting on the 15th. I'm hoping we get a couple more takers for the first submission.

(Hint hint. I'd do it myself, but I don't have anything worth submitting right now that hasn't already been workshopped to death.)

Haha. 3am-7am sleeping hours sounds more or less normal to me.

Yeah, I don't know how much writing I'm going to be able to get done in the next little while either. My proffs keep like... assigning me homework! What the heck's up with that?