I decided that Wednesdays are the best day to write a weekly progress report. It’ll keep me focused on my writing goals at a time when work and personal life demands are compounding, hold me accountable, and create a mechanism for charting my progress. Plus these progress posts are pretty easy to write even in the midst of “everything.”
So I’m a little less than halfway through a third read and “light” edit of WHEN THE FALLEN ANGELS FLY. This is what I do: write a big novel chunk then pore over it until I can live with moving on with the story. I wrote 45,000 words of the novel from July to September, and I figure I’m about two-thirds to the end. Right now, I’m re-reading the part where my protagonist Richard Carroll confronts a second assignment in his training to become an angel. The re-read/edit is pretty tedious. I’m hoping to get to the end of my draft in two weeks. Then, it’ll be a lot more fun writing the last third of Richard’s story.
Quixotic publishing news and non-updates: Believe it or not, The Paris Review rejected my short story THE TROUBLE WITH FINKLESTEINS. So maybe submitting there was a little unrealistic, but I couldn’t help myself. Now I go to Duotrope Digest and find a better publishing match. Two of my pieces are out on submission: CROTCHWATCHERS at Nighttrain and MIKE’S POND at Crazyhorse. I should get verdicts in about a month.
I just sent THE REGISTRATION to the wonderful author Eric Mays. We connected through the Facebook group LGBTI Writers and Allies and struck up a correspondence. It’s been really great talking to someone with experience in the biz. I haven’t tinkered with THE REGISTRATION or had it read for about six months so it’ll be nice to get a new perspective.
Last, I added a link in the spirit of my on-going OPERATION: OPTIMIZE. GayWisdom.org maintains a gay history archive, and you can subscribe to their free listserv and receive a daily e-mail telling you about significant events, biographies and quotes from gays past and present. I’m thinking this will be an awesome source of inspiration for my writing.
‘Crotchwatchers’!? I love that title!! ‘The Finklesteins’ sounds intriguing too, I hope these get published soon so I can read them!!
Thanks Baby J – I’m keeping my fingers crossed. And soon I’m going to put some writing samples up on the site. Just working out a strategy for featuring my work.