Living the Fictional Dream

I was surfing around the blog-o-sphere on this lazy Saturday, and I found some interesting links about Y/A fiction.

First, here is Y/A author Ally Carter (Gallagher Girls series) talking about the wrong questions aspiring Y/A authors ask. Then here she talks about the questions aspiring Y/A authors don’t think to ask, but should.

Then Agent Kristen talks about best-seller lists, using the Gallagher Girls as an example.

Happy reading, and I hope everyone has a relaxing Saturday.

So, based on my data-gathering software, in the past month, this blog has had visitors from quite a few of these United States and several other countries. The bulk of my traffic is from Texas, which makes sense because I live in Texas, but there have been significant hits from places where I’ve never even been and didn’t know I had any friends, like Spain and Minnesota.

If you read my blog and you’ve never commented, I’d love it if you stopped and said hello! I’d love to meet you, even in a virtual sense. And if you have blogs of your own, definitely link them.

Also, as I brainstorm for content lately, I’ve been wondering what my dear readers enjoy the most. Book reviews? Links posts? Insider comments on my writing? Ruminations on aspects of writing in general? My thoughts on and links to more informed thoughts on the publishing industry? Links to good stories out there? Writing group stuff? Nonwriting stuff? Anything else?

This is your chance to let me know what your favorite topics are, and I’ll definitely keep all comments in mind going forward!

And if anything comes to mind that you’d be interested in seeing as a new feature or topic, let me know. I’ve been toying with the idea of putting some of my fiction up on the blog, but that can be a little dicey. A lot of markets consider stories posted on a personal blog as “published,” and that limits where you can send your stories. However, I’m getting to the point where some of my stories that are already out there are hitting the end of the exclusivity clauses. I might be able to publish some of those here as reprints. Though, since most of those were available online, perhaps that would be a mite silly. You can always get to the ones that are still available out there via the link on my “Erin’s Stories” page.

Have a great day, everyone!

Today is a dreary Monday in Texas — humid and raining. On the up-side, at least the overcast skies mean it isn’t 100+ degrees outside!

Days like this are perfect for sitting at home curled up in one’s jammies, and the best activities for those times are reading a good book or writing a story. Sadly, I haven’t been able to do either today. Too much work to do! My company’s busy season gears up around August and lasts through November or so. If my updates around here are less frequent in the next few months, that’s the reason why. Never fear, though! There will still be updates.

I don’t have any particular writing news to impart at the moment. I have several stories in the revision queue and several stories for others in my crit queue, just waiting for me to find the time to work on them between all this work-work. I was out of town this weekend. Spending time with old friends is relaxing and refreshing.

If you’d like to read an actual blog on a writing-related topic, check out this post on Jen’s blog. It’s my guest blog spot — a column about young adult fiction. Sadly, the HTML tags that I handily put in the file for him so he didn’t have to worry about things like linking and italics, do not appear to have worked like they do on my blog, and have come across as text instead of as links or formatting. So, the column looks a little wonky, but hopefully it will be enjoyable just the same.

Have a great Monday, everyone, and if it’s raining where you are, try not to get too damp!

I was cruising the EDF forums this morning, and I found a link to this website. I didn’t know there were markets overseas that would translate English short stories and publish them (some for a nice fee). Of course, I read all the time on agent and author blogs about selling the foreign rights to novels, but the short story idea is a new one on me. I wonder if it is worth trying, or if you’d have to have big name publishing credits like Asimov’s, etc., to get in the door… Hmmm…

Why is it that when you have deadlines, your muse wants to write something else? I had to tie her down so that I could finish writing my guest blog for Jens (I’ll put a link here when that appears in August) and so I can make progress on my actual work work (this summer has been unusually busy!!!).

I also have a couple of stories in need of revising and another that I wrote a good first scene for, but now my muse is whispering intensely of another story all together. Arg! I just hope that she doesn’t clam up out of spite when I finally get some of these other obligations out of the way so I can sit down and pound out this new idea. The other stories I can put on hold, because that’s my stuff. It’s the deadlines for other people that have to be met first!

The more stories you get out there, the more chances you have of getting published. A real “duh” statement, huh? But… I don’t know… sometimes I need to be reminded of that.

It can take so long to hear back on a story, it feels like they fall into a void for a while, even as I am obsessively checking my email to see if I’ve gotten any responses. Sometimes I need to think about tossing more stories into the void to see if they hit solid ground instead of waiting around for the stories to come back.

I read a thread on the Every Day Fiction forums about some of the regular contributors. There are authors at EDF who get stories published with as much regularity as every month. It was nice to hear some of those regulars say on the forum that to get that many stories into EDF, they max out their submission opportunities.

EDF allows an author to have three stories in their slush pile at a time (which is pretty unusual), and some of these repeat authors have three stories in the slush constantly. Talk about a dedicated approach! And yet, those authors have the credits at EDF to prove that it works.

It seems a method that one could apply to one’s writing in general. It’s simple, right? Get those stories out there, and keep them going.

Of course… that means I need to actually write some new stories! Luckily, tomorrow is my writing group’s monthly write-in. Two hours of writing with friends. There is something great about a write-in for getting the creative energy flowing. I have a werewolf story that is almost finished — my goal for tomorrow is to complete the revisions on that sucker, and then maybe I’ll even see if I can find a likely market or two for it!

In other news, I found this article about unstoppable rules for writing short stories interesting.

This post on novel writing on Y/A novelist Libba Bray’s Live Journal cracked me up. Maybe I’ll have to check out some of her books. I’ve seen them around at the bookstore. They have lovely covers. Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover, but a lot of good books do also have pretty covers.

If you haven’t seen this, you really need to. You really, really need to.

The world’s first super-villain musical. If you like the stories at A Thousand Faces, you’ll like this. If you like any of the shows in the Joss Whedon universe (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly), you’ll like this (Joss does great stuff with lyrics — just think of “Once More With Feeling”).

I think humor is the most difficult thing to write successfully, and Joss is great at it. And what always blows my mind, both as a writer and a fan, is how he can lace the humor through the drama and get this whole complete story, but with amazing layers.

So, musings on writing and a viewing recommendation in one blog entry. Bonus, huh? Enjoy!

Agent Kristen over at Pubrants has an interesting blog post out on titles. I will have to marshal my thoughts on the subject and post about titles at some point. I find writing a good title very challenging…

Podcasts… the short story equivalent of an audio book. Snippets of fiction read aloud that can be listened to on the website or downloaded to your iPod or iTunes to listen to later.

I’d never really thought about this before, but it’s a cool idea. And, from a writing perspective, how amazing would it be to hear the words you write read aloud? Very, is my thought!

I took a screen writing class while earning my master’s degree. As part of the class we wrote two-page scenes and the professor brought in two actors to perform them. Watching my words come to life like that was amazing… Listening probably would be great, as well.

The other good thing about fiction podcasts from the writer’s point of view is that they seem to love reprints (or, at least, the ones whose guidelines I looked at did). It’s not often in the print and e-zine world that you can sell the same story twice!

I’ve been researching short fiction podcasts (with the help of some recommendations from my friend Stephanie), and I’ve come up with a few that seem interesting. I haven’t listened to all of them yet, but the ones that I did listen do had some great stories. If you’d like to try out a fiction podcast, you could start with one of these:

• Pod Castle — fantasy.
• Escape Pod — science fiction.
• Pseudopod — horror (pay attention to that warning on the first page).
• Drabblecast — speculative fiction/weird tales.
• Well Told Tales — horror, sci-fi, crime/hardboiled, pulp.
• Clonepod — sci-fi/fantasy.
• Bound Off — literary fiction.
• The Great Beyond — sci-fi/fantasy (though this one doesn’t seem to be updating very regularly).

If you do check some of these out, let me know which ones are your favorites.