I sent F&SF my latest story today. The good folks from Clarion who read it and gave me feedback all pretty much said it was a pleasing read but didn’t have any conflict or tension. Instead of rewriting the whole thing I just added a few sentences to make the immediate situation a bit more stressful. In short, the story’s about a soccer player who goes down during a game and the club physio needs to fix him up. Now, the injured player is a key to the team’s success and the game is of more importance.

We’ll see if it works. I’m not sure it’s F&SF’s style but I wasn’t sure about the story they bought, either. And like that one, I’m not sure this is good enough. John mentioned Analog as a possible market. Never sent anything there before and I might have to give it a try.

In happy news, I think I found the impetus to finish the longer story I had been writing. The structure is basically three scenes separated by some expositional world-building. Scenes one and two wrote themselves but I hit a brick wall when I got to scene three once I realized it was, more or less, scene two over again. Now I think I’ve found the idea that frees me up. It’ll finish around 8K but I think I can whack and whittle and hack and hew it down to 5.5 to 6K.

Is it any good? I have no idea. I lose perspective so quickly. Of course, it’s the golden mead of poetry while I’m writing but now I’m not even sure the internal logic works. Now I just have to get the ending written and begin the first round of edits to at least make it coherent.

I’m reading Nancy Kress’ “Beginnings, Middles, and Ends” after a few Clarion mates recommended it. It’s quite good. The only writing books I’ve read are William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” and now this one. Even though I feel like I know about 90% of the advice, that remaning 10% is quite useful and it helps to have the other stuff reinforced anyway. She’s also got interesting advice to help inject life into old stories.

Which helps. In the last year, I’ve finished exactly five original stories and I’ve sent out exactly two of them. I’ve run them all through the Clarion critique group and decided that the stories are all pretty good but they really do need something to finish them off. There’s no point in sending them out if I know they’re not working to their full potential. Nancy’s book is helping me look at them from a slightly different angle. She even has a line in her book that says, “Here are some ways you can sell your stories instead of getting the this isn’t quite what we’re looking for rejection letter.” Currently, I think could write the rejections for most of these stories myself.

And with an open weekend (finally!) I can put some time towards writing and hopefully get another burst of stuff out the first couple weeks of August.