I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the realities of writing for publication. In the past four years, the average word count on my “short” stories has been somewhere around 8000. Spend a few minutes on SpecFicMe or one of the other market clearinghouses and you’ll realize that instantly places most of my stories outside the maximum word counts allowed at 60-70% of the markets out there (I have no data to support this, but I suspect the average market word count is closer to 5000).

With more publishable stories in mind, I’ve been paying attention to a number of factors in my writing, one of these being the length of my stories. This has been a real challenge, mostly because I’ve found myself constantly watching the word count tally at the bottom of MS Word, and saying whiny things like, “but all I did was describe Captain Wingnut’s reaction to the iridescent sheen of the tentacle beast’s putrescent backside! How could that have taken 300 words?” In other words, I’ve gone from one extreme of writing (”full steam ahead and damn the word counts!”) to the other, in which the length of the piece acts like an annoying tailgater. Yeah, I can still drive with that jackass hanging inches off my bumper, but I don’t particularly enjoy it.

So I’m curious, fellow writers and readers of this blog (few and far between as you may be), how do you figure word counts into the creation process? Does the increasing length of a piece weigh down your pen? Do you figure there’s a market out there for every story? Do you leave that particular concern to the editing process? Let me know.

As some of you know, my wife and I have been expecting a baby girl for some time.  She’s due on Friday, if the averages hold up, but at the very least we can expect to meet her sometime in the next couple of weeks.   That is freaky, and exciting, and magical, and I’m officially opening the season on Babywatch 2007.   Any day now, I’m going to be a dad.

Parents and the such start arriving tomorrow, hoping to match their visits to baby’s arrival.  Should be fun.

“And Zeppelins.” A dream-inspired story that has gone through numerous rewrites and has always been a great example of how to write a beautiful story that no one will buy. So I’m using Zeppelins as a bit of writing exercise, forcing myself to cut away the chaff, move the action earlier, project the speculative element earlier, and speed my story telling up. We’ll see how it works out…

I’ve finally finished my rewrite of The Angels of St. Ambrose. I worked a lot on the narrative focus of the story, making it tighter around the protagonist, but the real work came in shaving another 1500 words off the manuscript. That was pure torture, but I got it under 12000 words. Still well within the novelette range, but hopefully more palatable to publishers. I mailed it off today to Leading Edge with warm thoughts and well wishes. Now I’m going to do my best to forget about it. I find that agonizing over the status of your submissions is the quickest route to poor productivity.  Next on the chopping block, a rewrite of And Zeppelins, my dream inspired addition to the myth of Pandora.

Discovered Afterworld last night while surfing Youtube.  Interesting, and weird.  Mostly weird.

After 22 months, my novella “The Angels of St. Ambrose” has been rejected by Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. That is a bummer, to be sure, but Edmund Schubert at IGMS softened the blow with some kind words and an invitation to submit personally to him next time. “Angels” was previously a Writers of the Future semi-finalist, and K.D. Wentworth (a guest judge) gave me some excellent feedback on improving the story. “Angels” went off to IGMS before K.D.’s letter arrived, so I now, finally, have the opportunity to incorporate the feedback and hopefully get this story in shape for publication somewhere. Better luck next time, I hope.

as I try to figure out how to create static pages within the Wordpress templates.  It’s got to be doable, but I’ve yet to get it.  Once I’ve figured it out, and completed the “stories” page, you’ll be returned to your regularly scheduled programming.

It’s been a while since I learned xhtml, and a real exercise in frustration trying to get this site up and running. The biggest issue is taking the php-laden Wordpress theme pages and adding in the xhtml layout I want without screwing up the blogging capabilities of the site. Bizarre changes in font color, mysterious borders appearing without warning, and many other gremlin-abetted screw-ups have plagued me from the get go. All that said, I think I’m starting to finally figure it out. The last thing I need to do is layout a “stories” page that will list my work with links to purchase the magazines and books I’m published in. Piece of cake…

On a related note: bit of a minor coup when I figured out how to create a favicon (that’s the icon to the left of the url in the browser’s address bar) that looks like a “C” typewriter key. It was a friend’s idea, in keeping with the visual concept of the site, and I like it a lot. I’m toying with making downloadable typewriter key favicons for all the letters of the alphabet and using it as a marketing tool to bring people to the site. Other authors with webpages would go nuts for them, I think.

Well, it was rather inevitable that as a starving writer trying to make my way in the ugly world of speculative fiction, I would start a blog. Sigh. Here it is.

It’s difficult to tell whether we (the aforementioned starving writers) do this out a well-thought out marketing plan, or simply because we have a pathological need to have our stuff read. Either motivation is probably a reasonable one, so I won’t dwell on it. I suppose it will be whatever it will be. Hope you enjoy it.