As promised, now that my novel is with the beta readers, I’ve jumped right into a little thing I like to call National Short Story Month. National might be putting it a little strong, because I’m the only one who’s actually, you know, doing it. But my long-held strategy is to pretend that I am the man until I actually become the man. You dig?
Anyway, week one, short story one will be completed this evening. For those of you keeping track, that’s two days behind schedule. On the other hand, I did spend two days planning out a short story that I didn’t actually end up writing, so there’s that. This was my submission for the Machine of Death anthology that I mentioned last time, so yeah. I’ll probably still end up writing it, or at least a version of it, but the way I had it plotted out involved a lot of talking and not a lot of doing. Bureaucracy is a hard thing to make interesting.
The story I did actually end up writing is tentatively called “The Desert Beyond the Water,” and basically re-invents “humanity’s first spaceflight” as “renaissance-era cephalopods take a trip above the surface.” I’ve always wanted to write a story about aquatic sentients, and now, thanks to NaShoStoMo, that dream has come true. The worldbuilding was just as intense as I expected it to be, but I don’t think it came out too bad for all of that. As scary as it is to say this, I think I’m going to shop the story around some after I fix it up a bit.
That’s right: my very first submission. Little Brad is growing up.
I’m not counting my submission to the NIWA anthology, of course. I was on the submission committee, so there’s no way it wasn’t getting accepted. We ended up accepting 13 stories for the anthology, which I’m pretty proud of. Half of those people had never heard of NIWA when we first announced the anthology, and it means that over 20 people are either NIWA members, in the anthology, or both. Not bad for a five-month-old organization that started with two people. I’m really looking forward to getting this one in print.
The Tenth Word 