Showing, rather than telling
First attempt:
Lyssa was miserable. First, Sheba kept her up all night with yowling, then she was up all night with Sheba at the vet’s, and then when she finally managed to get a full night’s sleep, she was plagued with so many nightmares that she wondered if she would have been better off getting no sleep at all.
Second pass:
“You look like hell, Lyss.”
Lyssa looked up at the voice to see Roberta standing at the side of her desk. She smiled weakly up at the other woman. “I feel like hell. I finally get a full night of sleep, and the nightmares were so bad I think I might have been better off staying up again.”
“Sheba?”
Lyssa shook her head. “Monsters. Did I tell you about the guy who showed up at lunch yesterday?”
***
Anyway, that’s what I’m up to. I hope everyone else had a great Thanksgiving (if you celebrate) and will have a very nice weekend. 
It’s ok…
It’s ok for first drafts to suck.
It’s ok for first drafts to suck.
It’s ok for first drafts to suck.
That’s what first drafts are *for,* right?
Progress!
I’ve got nearly 4,000 words of a new short story written, and I’m really happy with how both it and the world/culture it takes place in are shaping up!
Here’s hoping I can keep this up, and maybe even finish a draft this weekend.
Tomorrow, though, we’re going to go see The Dark Knight Rises! There’ll be six of us going, so whether it’s amazing and incredible and lives up to all expectations, or disappointing beyond belief, we should have a good time. (I’m really hoping for amazing and incredible, though!)
Deciding… sort of
So, my current plan is to go back to writing a story every week, but much less strictly than with the old story a week challenge. If I need to take a week off, I will, and I won’t be posting them here, at least not immediately. I’ll also be writing them with the intent of publishing them, either singly or as collections – but not until I think they’re ready.
It worked well with Refuge, so I’m going to see if I can do some more “episodic narratives,” as John Scalzi calls it.
First off, I’ve finally got an actual story for my not-cats! I’ve been wanting to write one for ages.
So what will you be seeing here? Well, updates like this one, and I’ll also try to post links to things I find cool or inspiring at least once a week. Whenever I publish a collection, I’m also planning to post the first story here as a sample.
Of course, as always, I may change my mind somewhere along the way and start working on something else. But I think this is a good plan for now.
How to build a writing career.
I’ve been reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog for a while now, and this post isn’t the first that’s set me to wondering what the best option for building a writing career is.
I agree with the basic premise, that the way to build a career is to write and publish, write and publish. The more you write, the better you’ll write, and the more you publish, the more chances you have of being found by an audience and making a living income.
The question is in the details. Write short stories or novels or novellas? How much should I revise, and am I hobbling myself with an unneccessary and/or unrealistic expectation of “good enough”?
Another of my must-read blogs belongs to her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, who has set himself a fascinating challenge. Over the next year, he’s going to write and publish 100 stories. He’s got a subscription plan and everything. And both he and Ms. Rusch are currently making a living at this – it isn’t a pie-in-the-sky plan, but a solid, this-works plan.
So why don’t I do something similar?
Start a new story a week challenge, only publishing each story as an ebook, probably for $0.99 since most of my stories are 5000 words or less. Post each to my website for a limited time, probably a week. Fill out the post with a bit of discussion on the writing of it, so that when the freebie goes away there’s still content as well as a link to the store.
Or perhaps a story every other week, since I’ll need to do up ebook covers and all the formatting… though that feels a bit like a cop-out, or like something I could use as one. An every-other-week pattern is harder to stick to than an every week, I think…
On the other hand, what if the stories aren’t good enough to sell? (There’s that phrase again.) And what about writing novels?
On the first hand again, is the idea of letting the reader decide, whether it’s good enough to buy based on sample, price, blurb, etc.
Stories can then be gathered up into collections, and sold at higher price points, even put up on CreateSpace so that paper copies are available.
And if I gain an audience, (Beyond my friends, because while I appreciate you immensely, I don’t want to make a living off you!) and start making money… well, then maybe I can cut my day-job hours, (eventually to 0) and have time to work on novels too.
Novels take a LOT of time, and I’m not very good at them yet, so it’s probably going to take several more tries before I have one I’m not too critical of to publish. Short stories I’m more confident with. (No wonder, I’ve had a lot more practice.) Short stories are also fun, and have that immediate gratification benefit.
I might be talking myself into this… but I’m still feeling a lot of fear and uncertainty. Would doing this make me a hack? If it does, is that a bad thing? Some people consider all genre writers to be hacks, and I’m certainly not shooting for “literature.”
Ah well, we’ll see. Opinions are welcome, but I can’t guarantee I’ll take any advice. 
© 2010 Catherine Wechsler, used with permission.
