Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Diary Of A Mad Writer #8 - So The Foresight Had Some Insight, In The Light Of Hindsight. (Thankyou, Bernard)

As I look towards the future, I've decided it might be a good time to take a step forwards and take the opportunity to look back at the previous projects I have begun, both to get an indication of the work I've done so far, and to see if there are any works that may be worth salvaging and updating for future use. Or to put it simply, in order to move forward I've looked backwards and taken the past to use in the future, and find to think forwards, one must in truth, think backwards, but only in a back to front forward thinking way.

Allow me to elaborate.

Or at least, to stop talking nonsense.

I've about ten years worth of various projects on my computer, not all of them finished. Sadly I don't seem to have anything from before this, as I appear to have deleted it all (or at least, not backed up my files when we changed computers). It was probably terrible, as it was all from 16 years and under, but I'd have liked the opportunity to have said that myself.

As my current main goal is to get something published in a sci-fi/fantasy magazine within (hopefully) the next six months, I've been going through my old files to see if there was anything that could be polished up and submitted as is. the outlook so far, is not good. Out of all the files I've been through, they have all broadly fallen into one of the following categories:

1. Too Short - The magazines I have found have a minimum word count of 2000 words, quite a few of my short stories fall around the 1600 mark.

2. Too Long - Most of the other stories I have exceed the maximum length (8000 words)

3. Wrong Genre - Many of those that are neither too long or too short are in fact too 'not science fiction or fantasy', making them difficult to submit to a sci-fi/fantasy magazine.

4. Wrong Format - Written for radio, film, television, or theatre. Could possibly be rewritten, but most of them fall into category 1, 2, or 3 anyway.

5. Atrocities - Awful work, kept because I no longer wish to throw any stories out, but deserving to be burnt in a fire(wall).

After you throw out all of those, you're not really left with anything, except for a couple of recent projects that fit the bill perfectly, except they fall into category 6: Not finished yet.

However, while looking through the pieces I discoverd a bunch of longer stories I had begun but never conituned beyond about the 10th chapter (or in one case, the 2nd page). As it turns out there's a reason for this which is probably deserves its own blog, but looking through them I was actually rather pleased with what I'd written so far. So I've dug them out and am editing them between calls at work in an attempt to bring them up to spec, and then can look at either finishing them, or adapting them into shorter works that would be suitable for submission.

So is there anything I can submit now? No. But there are plenty of things I will be able to submit, once they're done.

Assuming I don't change computers anytime soon.

No comments:

Post a Comment