I'M OLD

AND THAT'S OKAY. ISN'T THAT RIGHT, THE DOUBLECLICKS? RIGHT.


http://youtu.be/zCF_js2y0Ec

I don't have any big plans for my birthday this year—mostly because, honestly, it'll be hard to top last year's incredible awesomeness—but it's been a really good year so far...

• I self-published a collection of my 512 Words or Fewer stories
• We went on our fourth JoCo Cruise Crazy, and ran our best puzzle-hunt-at-sea yet
• I went to Clarion West!
• I got an agent!!
• Puzzled Pint grew to ten cities
• I sold more short fiction, including my first SFWA qualifying pro sale!!!
• I've been invited to present at StoryCon this month and the SFWA Readings next month

What's next? Well...

• More short fiction sales, hopefully (I currently have nine stories out on submission, of which three have been shortlisted)
• We'll see what happens with Waypoint Kangaroo, the novel my agent is trying to sell
• I'm going to the Surrey International Writers' Conference for the first time
• I'll be doing NaNoWriMo again, of course
• It looks like Puzzled Pint will expand to eleven cities this month

Life is good. :)

OryCon is Coming

It's now two months until OryCon 35, and DeeAnn and I are once again volunteering! We hope to see some of you lovely people at the con. (But not on Sunday. See below for details.)

DeeAnn has been acting as pre-con liaision for all the Guests of Honor (GoHs), including author Anne Bishop, artist Larry Elmore, editor Liz Gorinsky, and media GoH Matt Vancil. This seems to involve lots of e-mail, intermittent telephone calls, and making maps and gift baskets. I do my best to help where I can, and stay out of her way otherwise.

Myself, I'm running the Open Read and Critiques (ORCs) again, as I have since 2009. Here's this year's blurb:

An Open Read & Critique (ORC) is an opportunity to read the first 750 words of your short story or novel aloud to your peers and receive a Clarion-style critique of your work. Our theme is "How to Hook a Reader." All writers and genres are welcome! Look for sign-up sheets outside our meeting room starting Friday morning (first come, first served). Content should be rated PG-13 and contain no explicit sex, graphic violence, or excessive profanity. More info online at: http://35.orycon.org/activities-events/orc/

Because I can't resist tinkering with the schedule, this time around the one-hour ORC sessions will happen:

• Friday at 2pm
• Friday at 8pm
• Saturday at 1pm
• Saturday at 2pm

I'm also going to be on a panel titled "Social media, time suck or revolution" on Saturday at 11am, and then I have a writers' workshop critique session with two pros at noon. Finally, DeeAnn and I have to catch a flight to California Saturday night, because our good friend Chris is getting married in Calistoga on Sunday. I will also theoretically be doing NaNoWriMo the whole time.

So yeah, that second weekend in November is going to be pretty interesting.

Friday Flash Fiction: "The Old Switcheroo"

One more excerpt from this year's NaNoWriMo draft!

I officially "won" on the 28th, but I'm going to one final write-in tonight to get a little farther along, and also to see my fellow Vancouver Wrimos one more time. Then I need to plot out the second half of the story and finish writing it... in December maybe?

Read "The Old Switcheroo" at 512 Words or Fewer

Friday Flash Fiction: "Food for Thought"

More from this month's NaNoWriMo draft.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that the pictured food item is actually Korean, not Japanese.

And one of my favorite quotations of all time*, from the late Lin Yutang: "What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?"

Read "Food for Thought" at 512 Words or Fewer



* OF ALL TIME!

Friday Flash Fiction: "Bottoms Up"

More from this month's NaNoWriMo draft.

Also, it's really a toss-up as to whether Wikipedia or Myths RETOLD is more factually accurate overall, but the latter sure is a lot more entertaining to read.

Read "Bottoms Up" at 512 Words or Fewer

Friday Flash Fiction: "Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba"

Why a palindrome for today's story title? Because this is my 215th 512 story, which makes the shortlink (below) palindromic as well!

And yes, this is more from my current NaNoWriMo draft. It's kind of a fun challenge to pick out a scene, or part of one, which I can compress into ~500 words.

Read "Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba" at 512 Words or Fewer

Friday Flash Fiction: "Coffee is for Closers"

#NaNoWriMo has begun, so you're likely to see a bunch of excerpts from my new novel draft over the next few weeks. This one's a continuation of the story (and world) established in "Making Waves."

Also, have you seen Glengarry Glen Ross? That flick is dope.

Read "Coffee is for Closers" at 512 Words or Fewer

Friday Flash Fiction: "Interview Prep"

More from this year's NaNoWriMo draft, because my capacity for laziness is great. And no, this conversation is not as autobiographical as you might imagine.

Read "Interview Prep" at 512 Words or Fewer

Friday Flash Fiction: "Police Duality"

It occurred to me this week that I haven't yet exercised my laziness and excerpted any part of my NaNoWriMo output from this year as a 512. So, here you go! (This bit is not particularly skiffy, but rest assured, the novel itself is quite genre-tastic.)

Read "Police Duality" at 512 Words or Fewer

Friday Flash Fiction: "Exterior, Alley, Daytime"

Today's flash is not a complete story. It's not even a complete scene. It is another small piece of my current novel-in-progress, and a companion piece to "Gone But Not Forgotten," featuring the same main characters in further dialogue.

As for the title, my submission to my Sunday Skype critique group this week was a half-hour comedy pilot. I finished polishing the current revision this afternoon, so I had sluglines on the brain. Occupational hazard of writing broadly.

Read "Exterior, Alley, Daytime" at 512 Words or Fewer

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

The long flat stretches you see on the graph below are due to (1) laziness, (2) OryCon, and (3) Thanksgiving, respectively:



That's all for now. More on this later, over at LJ.

Done and done

I wrote 10,700 words of fiction today, bringing my total for NaNoWriMo to just under 52,000 words, which got me this lovely parting gift:



I may post more about this year's experience later, but for now, here are some totally misleading statistics.

The official nanowrimo.org word tracker (shown below) is wildly inaccurate, because at least twice (including last night, when I did 7,300 words), I updated my total after midnight, and so it was added to the next day's count instead. I would really prefer to be able to manually assign my word counts to specific days, since until the verifier goes live on November 25th it's all manual updates anyway.



Because of OryCon 31 and other obligations, I only actually spent 15 out of 30 days writing this year's novel. My lowest word-count day was 570 on November 17th, and my highest was 10,700 on November 30th (which may also be the most words I've ever written in a single day for anything).

My mean average word count per working day was about 3,400. If I throw out the highest and lowest outlying data points, it's 2,900. But first draft is not my problem. Revision is what kills me.

As per usual, I did minimal outlining, though I did keep notes and make sketches throughout the month. The final novel actually did contain all the elements I anticipated when I filled out this form at the kick-off party: