Tuesday, December 26, 2023

A Year of Creative Challenges

Refer to the first post of the year "A Year of Creative Challenges."

As 2023 comes to an end next week, I see it go with a small level of sadness mixed with a pinch of pride. I started this year with notion that I would do a creative challenge a month every month. Many of the challenges I took required me to work on them daily. That was a lot of commitment. Some of them I finished quickly, and some took longer than the month they were intended to take. Some of these I did with friends. Some I did with strangers. Some I did alone.
Here's the rehash:

January—Daily drawing challenge with Kimberly. I did 31 pen and ink drawings.

February—Daily watercolor painting with Kimberly. I did 28 watercolor paintings.

March—A mini comic. I made a four part mini comic in a zine format. I made hand drawings that I put into vectors with illustrator and did the layout in InDesign.

April—Camp NaNoWriMo. I wrote a 50,000 word novel called The Cataract.

May—Daily photos with Kimberly. I made a photobook from Smartphone photos. I also made a second photobook with some film I had developed during the month. So, two for one this month.

June—Painting project. I painted 20 faces. This was a weird one.

July—Camp NaNoWriMo. I wrote a second 50,000 (closer to 60) word novel called Exile.

August—Click it up a notch photo challenge. This was the dog of the year. I used my DSLR and I hated every day of this. The resulting book was not all that bad.

September—Poetry. I did this one lofi. I typed the poems with a manual typewriter and then bound the poems together into a book with some pastel paintings. A true one of a kind.

October—Inktober with Kimberly. I did 31 pen and ink drawings.

November—NaNoWriMo. I wrote the third novel of the year. This one is called: Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver.

December—A submission a day. I submitted 31 short stories to 31 different magazines.

Additionally: I read 52 books, wrote 52 blogposts, drained countless pens and filled a dozen notebooks. It's been a very prolific year.

Monday, December 18, 2023

A Submission a Day: Final Thoughts

I love the very idea of getting a story published. I can't think of a single writer who doesn't like this. I love the small literary magazines too. I love that so many of them are looking for writers of marginalized communities. I am tickled to think that so many magazines and editors are after the same thing that I'm after: something different, something new, something with flavor.

I don't fear for the future as some of my colleagues do. I don't think that AI will take over. And who cares if it does? Once the power goes out, so will the computers. I also think that people who read literary magazines are looking for something a machine cannot provide. When you get involved with a literary magazine, what you really want is community.

As for me? Well, it's been a fascinating glimpse into who I was as a person and as a writer. Sure, I have written a great many short stories. I can tell with utmost honesty, and this is not a self deprecating thing, that most of these stories are not very good. I have to ask myself, what was important when I wrote them? Was the product important? No, it was the process. I have always been the writer that will write ten stories and pick the best one and I feel like that provides me with better odds than to just write one.

I will not say that this is the end of my writing of short stories. I will not say that I'm eager to write more in the future either. I have no plans to continue writing them. If I've learned anything over the years what it takes to produce a good short story is to read a bunch of them, and then start writing a bunch of them. I'm no longer willing to do that.

What's going to happen with the stories I've put out for consideration this month? I won't know the outcome for weeks, possible months. The few editors that have sent rejections already I am very grateful to. If an editor is not interested in a story, the most considerate thing they can do is to reject it quickly.

I started this because I wanted to be relevant. Have I become relevant? Again, I won't know for months.

What I do know, I've been enjoying this process immensely.

Monday, December 11, 2023

A Submission a Day: Part 2

As I started this process of submitting a story a day, it came to a question of which stories. I have written just under 200 short stories since 2009. I have, maybe, another 100 that I wrote before 2009. When I say I have 300 short stories, I think this may be a very conservative number. Please don't think I'm a braggart, just because I've written 300 short stories, doesn't mean they're any good. And of the good ones, it doesn't mean that they're publishable.

How does one figure out the stories to choose for submission? Well, it's not nearly as hard as you might think. I decided to forgo anything written before 2009. Of the two hundred that remained, I decided not to use any that had a word count over 4,200 words. Who the fuck wants to read that many words? Not me. Then, I cut out the ones that I knew for sure were not in good shape. Then I chose what I thought was a good representation of what I write and who I am.

Who Was I?

What I discovered, and alarmingly so, is that writers really do write what they know. So many of my short stories are about chain smoking, heavy drinking and fucking on the floor. These are things that I don't do any more. But I did. And now, I realize that it's cliché. It's all so very cliché.

So, if I remove all the stories about being a drunken buffoon, there wasn't many left over. I picked 13 stories, all between 900 words and 4,200 words. And away I went.

By the end of the second week, I had held true to the submission a day. I used newpages.com to research my markets. I've already received a few rejections.

Monday, December 4, 2023

A Submission a Day: part one

For December's creative challenge, I decided I would submit a short story a day all month. The reasons why I decided to do this are so many that I don't know if I'll be able to organize my thoughts on the subject.

For starters, I have been feeling low lately. This happens to me from time to time. It usually happens in the fall and into the early part of the winter. I really loathe the winter. I live in Colorado, and I do appreciate the fact that it's sunny all winter. It's dry. It's brown. It's really fucking dirty. And to circle back around to the submission process, when I feel down, the rejections that will inevitably come my way just don't affect me negatively. In the event that I get a publication, well, it really improves the overall feeling.

Also, I feel like every few years when I don't feel relevant anymore, a few publications make me feel like I'm still here, I'm still alive. To put it into perspective, my last publication was in the fall of 2020. That's a long time ago.

Then there is a practical element to this. When I submit to magazines, I treat it like research for my own magazine, Umbrella Factory Magazine. After all, UFM got it's start because of a rejection letter I got back in 2009.

The other thing I know, and this happens almost without fail, 90% of these submissions will be rejected. If not rejected, then ghosted. That leaves me with the 10% that will run in a magazine somewhere. If I submit all month, 31 submissions, if all goes well, I can count on 3 publications.