What Are Words For?

The first two people who can either identify the song or the group, without using the Internet, that this blog title is connected to, will have a very nice blog post written about them.

With that being said, what are words for? Kind of a philosophical question but really, what are words for? When you string a bunch of them together, you form sentences and paragraphs, which in turn conveys an intelligent message (hopefully) to the people who may peruse them during a moment of free time. But really, what kind of message are you trying to convey with these words that you have chosen to string together to make sentences and paragraphs?

If you're like me, you're trying to create an interesting story that will resonate with someone, preferably an editor, and make them say, "Hey! That's a purty durn gud story!"

With that in mind, let's take a short look at the various stories that I've created in the past year to see what, if anything, is going on with them.

1} Short Story #1! One of the short stories that I wrote about a year and a half ago, which was originally called "A Day At The Office" and originally posted on my closed story blog, is currently being submitted to a couple of e-zines. However, I did tweak and tighten the story a little before I decided to submit it. It's worth noting that I did make sure that the e-zines I'd submitted had ambiguous guidelines as it specifically applied to previously published short stories, so hopefully if it does get rejected, it will be rejected on it's own merits and not because it was previously published on my blog.

2} Short Story #2! Another short story that I wrote almost two years ago, which was originally featured as a serial on my short story blog, is also making the rounds. Originally titled "The Right Thing", it was also submitted to a couple of e-zines with ambiguous guidelines, after it was re-written and tightened to bring it under 5K words.

3} Short Story #3 & #4 & #5! These are three short stories that I'm debating on submitting, simply because they were also previously posted on my blog. #3 was originally written between one and two years ago and was originally featured as a fractured serial on my closed short story blog. I did some extensive re-writing and successfully joined all the parts together and gave it the title of "Singularly Married". #4 was the story that I posted last month on Partially Yours called "Patience Is A Sin". I liked the re-written version so much that I'm willing to wait about six or several months before making the rounds with it. #5 is the original story that was the opening salvo of my current writing project, which is simply titled "The Backpack". I think that it has enough oomph for it to be a very nice stand alone story somewhere.

The one common theme that all of these stories (save #5) have is that they were originally published here. Hopefully that won't be a deterrent in the long run, especially since I decided to tweak and tighten the content of those stories.

4} Line 21! Not much going on with this one. I'm still waiting for a final response from a submission back in July and the subsequent follow-up e-mail back in October from one particular publisher, and I'd just sent off a query to an agent (which you'll find the particulars on the Line 21 page) that was featured in the blog Novel Spaces about a couple of weeks ago. I do have one question connected with this update: is six months the normal wait time for a response from a publisher?

5} Blackness In The White Sand! I'm making slow and steady progress with this novella, especially since I decide a couple of weeks ago to make an effort to schedule blocks of writing time for myself. Internet withdrawal has been difficult at times, but I am getting better at dealing with no online surfing. I just completed chapter five and started on chapter six over the weekend, with probably one more chapter to write before I consider this particular story to be done. Still haven't decided on whether I should have a definite ending to it, or something a little more ambiguous. The reason as to why I'm undecided is that I have another story called "A Troubled Conscience" already written and so far I've been unable to find a home for it, so I was thinking about using that in this particular novella, sort of like a part two to a planned trilogy of sorts.

6} The Unknown Story! Well, not really unknown, as the story has already been published, but I got to designing a nifty little bookmark for it last week. Hopefully I'll have something to show everyone in the coming weeks, but just the same, that particular story is still available for purchase from me, for the low price of $7, and I'll pick up not only the sales tax, but the S&H as well.

And that's all the writing news that this moderate Republican sees fit to commit to computer screen.