It’s A Kind of Magic

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.
― Carl Sagan

This was a week, I tell you what.

First of all, I’m making myself crazy with Firestorm. Should I keep going as it is, should I create a plan of attack for it, or should I just start over? The whole mercenary thing seemed like a good idea at the time, seeing as it generated so many words for NaNo, but it needs to be cleaned up and expanded if I’m going to keep it, condensed if it’s just going to be a footnote in his life.

Now, if I keep it (which I’m leaning towards) I’ll need to make some major adjustments to my time lines. But I’ll also need to put a little more thought into it, and I’ve got other irons in my fire right now that need their fair share of attention.

For instance, I have about 10,000 words written on the book I’m taking to the writing retreat in the spring (unless it gets moved again). It would be kind of nice to at least double that, but I have only a vague idea of where it’s going. Might be nice to figure that out as well.

There’s also the edits on Blood Ties, which kind of ground to a halt during NaNo, and let’s not forget about An Elemental Spirit, which was NaNo 2019. So maybe I need to take a step back and get my priorities straight.

Meanwhile, I edited my story, tweaked it, took a deep breath, and sent it off into the wild. I should hear within three weeks whether it’s been accepted or not. I’m thinking in the new year I should be making a habit of sending stories out, maybe even some poetry. What good is a story or poem if no one else ever reads it?

I also spent a great deal of time picking out stories, then rejecting stories, for my book flood anthology. I thought I had a decent line up, but then realized they were all pretty dark. So I changed out a few, thought about it, changed a few more, and finally settled on my line-up. It’s got a little bit of everything – horror, humour, weird, and wonderful.

Then, of course, I spent a day arranging and re-arranging the order, formatting it for printing, and testing the print-run. My printer gives me the option of printing in booklet format which is a big time-saver, but there’s also the matter of getting the font size right and inserting a blank page where needed so each story starts on an odd page.

Then I realized I could add page numbers, and page numbers meant an index. Okay, so the index is in a separate document so I didn’t have to go to the trouble of suppressing the first couple of page numbers, but it was no big deal to print it out separately. And Staples very nicely cut all the pages for me, for free.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the results. And I can take pride in the fact I did it all myself. I guess that’s also a kind of magic.

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Wordage Report

I added a few words to Firestorm last week but I was so busy doing other things that that was it for the writing. My blog posts were up on time, so that was something. And then Thursday I spent considerable time on my post for Friday before realizing I was doing a superstitions post, not a fiction post. *sigh*

I signed up for the Writer's Digest prompt a day. It's supposed to be delivered to my inbox but I think I messed up my email when I signed up because I haven't received any yet. But I figure these prompts should be a quick and easy daily exercise and I can post the best two or three on Fridays.

Goals From Last Week

1. 500 words a day – only about one day’s worth.
2. Finish editing story and submit – I did!
3. Finalize stories for book flood anthology – another win
4. Learn to use coil binder – learning as you read

Goals For This Week

1. Prompt a day.
2. Find new story for submission
3. Start edits on Blood Ties
4. Make up my mind about going forward with Firestorm.

Lessons Learned

The book flood anthology is, for all intents and purposes, done! Woohoo!

It’s not pretty, but it is what it is in the time I had. And in the process I learned several valuable lessons:

1. Pick a theme before picking your stories.
My theme was apparently “early stories that are out-dated and I didn’t know what else to do with them.” My stories run the gamut from comedy to morbid, and span a variety of genres. And when I came up short on stories I filled in the space with a few poems.
Also, I kept switching between all dark flash and all non-dark flash and all new stories to all old stories. Figure out what kind of stories you’re going to collect before you waste a lot of time editing the wrong story.

2. Give yourself lots of time – then add some.
I’ve been toying with the idea of an anthology for a while, but it wasn’t until I decided to use it for my book flood book that I started to get serious about it. I’m not sure exactly when this was, but I know I didn’t take into account the time suck NaNo would be.

3. Decide an approximate number of pages early.
It will help you figure out the size of your anthology and how many stories you’re going to need to work with.

4. Decide the binding ahead of time.
This kind of goes with number three because the number of pages will help determine the kind of binding you can go for. Just a few pages, you can have a chapbook, more and you’ll have to look for some other kind of binding.

5. Take it seriously.
I got caught up in the whole idea of an anthology and started working on it before I really thought it through. Then I kept changing my mind and waffling on the stories. If I’d been a little more serious about it I would have thought it through better and saved myself a lot of time and angst.

The anthology is a little stark looking, to my eye. It could have used a few flourishes like a more decorative font for the titles, maybe a graphic or two. Again, this is something I just didn’t have time for. And something to keep in mind for next time.

Ironically, I have an idea for next year’s NaNo and it’s a themed anthology. But trust me when I say I’ll be taking my time when it comes to publishing it.

Busy as a Bee

This is going to be another one of those good news/bad news posts. The good news is that it’s been a week since NaNo ended and I’m still spending a lot of my daytime hours in my office, the bad news is that I don’t feel like I’m getting a whole lot accomplished.

I’ve been struggling a lot with the anthology and I have to say it’s been kicking my butt. A couple of the stories had to be re-typed (because they pre-dated me owning a computer), and many of the others have formatting issues. Specifically, they have straight quotation marks instead of curly marks.

Now, I had to deal with this once before and it was a fairly easy fix. But I don’t know if it’s because my version Word is so out of date or if it’s a Windows 10 thing, but I cannot get them change in bulk. I Googled a couple of different ways – neither of them worked. I even tried to use find/replace using the character map for my curly quotes. It didn’t work either.

This means I have to replace them one by one – including the apostrophes. Do you know how time consuming that is? With some of the shorter stories it’s almost quicker if I just retype the darn things.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking down. I need to get this anthology done like yesterday for the ones that need to be mailed. I have 10 stories finalized, but four of the stories are long, older ones which got me to thinking I should only use old stories and make it a chap book, maybe throw in a few poems just to make it interesting.

It doesn’t help that I keep waffling on the format as well. Chapbook, spiral bound, perfect binding – I guess it will all depend on how long it is.

Goal For the Week

GET THE ANTHOLOGY DONE ALREADY!

This will be me this week: