David Thurston has…

First writing day ended up not entirely structured as planned, and I think the problem is that I tried to write too much.  That was lesson #1 that my Thing a Week taught me, I can’t really force myself to write if inspiration isn’t hitting me.  Perhaps it would be better to call those editing days, cause once I started doing that, things went much more smoothly.

Edited The Doorman, a post-zombie story that got some decently positive comments when I submitted it to CVS, but needed some major changes to the flashback structure.  Which I made.  It’s not done-done, but it’s a lot better now than it was, and might be one of the next things I start seriously shopping.

To do this week:

• One more editing pass on Doorman
• Editing pass on Queen of Belmeth, at which point I’ll consider it ready to go out
• Submission critique for CVS

Belmeth I’m considering shipping off to Weird Tales, just to shoot for the moon.  Next short story I’ll likely touch is Div0, which is mostly done, but I think I can push the dark humor a little more.  For my Writing Editing Day on Jan 19, I’ll probably start cracking into Conqueror Worm.

Well, I ended up with tomorrow off, which I wasn’t initially expecting.  So I figured if I want to have Writing Days in 2009, why not start with the second day of the year.  I’m going to plan to clock in somewhere around 9, and start with a massive editing pass of Doorman (which probably actually means rewriting it, since I’m completely changing the structure).  That’s far from the whole day, so after that…I dunno.  Probably whatever feels right to work on.  Thinking about getting started on editing Conqueror Worm.

I was originally going to call this another resolution, but I realized that’s not really what it is.  Resolutions are things that you want to get done in the coming year, and the reason a lot of them fail is that people have goals, but don’t really have a pathway planned out towards achieving those goals.  So, for 2009, I’m going to have Writing Days.  These are going to be days where writing is my job.  Clock in, do at least 6 hours work in some kind of writing, then (and this is the important part) clock out again.  These aren’t necessarily days I’ll specifically take off from work, January’s will probably be my employer-given day off on MLK Jr Day.

Now, I can already hear you.  But David, you’re saying, don’t you normally work an eight hour day?  Part of the goal will be to ramp up.  January: 6 hours.  Feb: 6.5 hours.  By May I’ll be taking an 8 hours writing day.  It’s something I’m going to have to get used to, but it’s something I want to get used to.

Follow up to yesterday: submission is safely being whisked off towards Los Angeles.

I’m writing this while waiting for an edited version of Sleep to print out.  Once it does, it’s going into a nice big envelope along with an SASE for a trip out to Los Angeles to be considered for Writers of the Future.  Been so long since I’ve submitted anything that I’m reading the rules three, four, and five times over to make sure I haven’t done some stupid thing to get myself eliminated from competition without a word being read.  Especially the rule about the fact that the story must never have been previously published, a rather important distinction for anyone who knows the history of Sleep.

No name on the work except the cover.  Check.

Page numbers.  Check.

Manuscript format.  Check

SASE.  Check.

Printing has completed.  Now it’s just working up the nerves to head down to the car and get me to the Post Office.  After this one heads off, the next project will probably be a big edit of The Dorman, a story that I think has a lot of good potential, but also needs a really strong editing pass.

Way back when I wrote a novel.  And that novel was called Rust.  It was my first Nanowrimo project, and the first novel that I took from start to finish.  It’s also one that I eventually “published” through the on demand website Lulu.  It’s a novel I haven’t thought about much of late, mostly because it’s not a novel that I hold in the highest of esteem.

That was until two weekends ago when I brought a copy to a book swap.  I brought it as a joke to the other member of the CVS present, not realizing that there would be more people there than just the writing group.  And sure enough, someone grabbed the book.  Who wasn’t a member of the group.  So that means that, once again, there are copies out there.

So I’ve been thinking “what the hell”.  This is a book that I originally serialized as I wrote it on my old Livejournal account.  This is a book that I put onto Lulu for the world to see.  I did both of these knowing full well that I was blowing away the First Publication Rights on the novel.  So it’s time to do it again.  New website, new blog, new year, same old book.  Keep an eye out, as over the next few months I’m going to start serializing Rust here on the website, probably over at my Burn Bin, for anyone who has heard of it and been curious.  I’m not rewriting it, I’m not doing another editing pass, it will be there in its full glory in the format available on Lulu.

Enjoy!