The Pen Is Creating Splotches On The Paper

That's not much of a much.---catch phrase I created for myself in my younger days

The above sentence about sums up my calendar week (Wednesday to Wednesday) in all things related to writing.

I touched upon a whole bunch of things, but like a kid with ADD in a toy store, I was too overstimulated to see anything through to completion.

Note, if you're thinking I'm insulting everyone with ADD, you're probably right. However, as one who was diagnosed using the old-fashioned term "hyperactivity" and went through all the drugged out nonsense when he was younger (Ritalin. Is. Good), I think I've more than earned the right. So there.

Anyways, among the things I touched upon and didn't really complete were these brainless top heavy cuties:

1} Short Story. I got to thinking about some of the completed short stories that I got sitting on my computer gathering dust, so I decided to take a crack at finding a few magazines that I might be able to submit them to. However, before doing that, I spent some time tweaking the content to a couple of them. Satisfied at a job averagely done, I went off on my search and destroy at the Duotrope website. Didn't quite find a good one that I wanted for one particular story of mine called "A Troubled Conscience" (story about revenge with some elements of Heaven and Hell woven into it), but because I set the search terms incorrectly, I found a few adult publishers that I might consider submitting my book to. Another one that I tweaked, was one that was originally posted here in blogland about year ago, so I'm looking for a home for that as well.

2} Line 21. Speaking of the book, I haven't made a lick of progress on any more submissions. I guess it boils down to playing by the rules set forth by the various publishing entities/literary agents out there, so patience, which has never been a virtue (good or bad) with me, is something I'm getting used to having. However, I do think that my best shot at getting published would be to concentrate on the small to medium size presses, only because I don't think that my book is the type that any agent would take on. Unless somehow I turned it into a YA fantasy, then they'll jump all over it, because as you know YA is the hottest and most overly saturated market on the planet, thus there's always room for one more dead title.

2a} YA. Yeah, I just insulted YA and YA writers and agents who specialize in YA. However, it's not that hard to come to the conclusion that the market is both extremely hot and extremely saturated. It seems that every success story I come across (and I've come across quite a few) features a YA writer landing an agent or a YA writer getting published.

Small hint people: YA is not the be all to end all. If you keep pushing one particular genre down the collective throat of the reading public, you're gonna wind up turning off an important and necessary segment of the reading public that you will need in order to keep all of those retail functions that are out there viable. What segment? Why, the ones who actually buy the books to begin with.

3} Dandelion Tears. Why is it that whenver you get stuck as a writer, the only way you can get unstuck is to write something so far out of your comfort zone that more often than not it helps move the story along? For me, it seems that whenever I get stuck while writing this latest project, two things usually happen. One, I start writing the story by hand. Tedious I know, but it works because it forces me to concentrate on what I'm thinking about for a plot and what I'm deciding to write for either dialogue or scene. Two, I write a scene that is far and beyond my comfort zone. With this story, I opened and closed the previous chapter with a scene that is far and beyond my comfort zone, and I opened the next chapter also with that same type of scene. In all honesty, I'm never comfortable reading about that particular scene nor am I comfortable writing about that as well, but apparently it did the trick as I'm starting not only to make decent progress with the story, but I'm outlining a little bit as well.

I originally wrote this post to be published two week ago, but as many of you know, I had a short story of mine accepted since then, plus a few other ideas cropped up (one of which I'd elaborated on in the previous week that is briefly touched upon in point #3) that caused this post to be pushed back to the end of the month. So, it's sort of accurate, because I'm still doing the same thing two weeks later what I originally wrote about two weeks ago.