So I'm back revising the damned novel and am growing very angry at the necessity. Every fibre of my being screams out to write a short story instead of slogging away to find typos, bad grammar, confusion of time and place, etc and so forth within this monster. Worse, the completion of this effort will only free me to work on the two other rambling tales of frustration and toil - much like that I experience whenever I touch this one.
But, what the hell, it is writing, isn't it?
Back in the day I had no trouble writing short stories, novelettes, and novellas quickly and sometimes found willing markets to publish them. But as time passed I grew more prolix and more conscious of what (and how) I was writing. This led me into a long period of introspection when I questioned my ability to cast a tale worth telling. The decline of my ability to sell a novella-length story to a magazine might have played a part. I attribute this both to my lack of imagination and the declining interest of editors to use up that much space for long pieces.
"Write short!" Schmidt encouraged me, and so I did, which resulted in a LOT of 15K stories that I then had to edit down under seven thousand words to make them salable. It was a lot of work for few rewards, at least at first, but eventually I re-learned the secret, began to write shorter drafts that required less editing and, eventually, managed to sell a string of shorts. At the same time my trunk continues to grow, overwhelming my list of published tales.
Seeing my short works being published is nice, but I still feel that commercially publishing more than a single novel would be an accomplishment. That's why I'm trying to finish the novels-in-development instead of adding more stories to my growing collection of unsold ones.
Someone recently suggested that I ePublish my unsold novellas and novelettes, but my past experience with ebooks makes me doubt that I'd realize any decent income from those. Maybe they were just that poorly written or lacked publicity or were simply lost among the millions of other works - who knows?
ePublishing is so confusing.
#SFWpro
But, what the hell, it is writing, isn't it?
Back in the day I had no trouble writing short stories, novelettes, and novellas quickly and sometimes found willing markets to publish them. But as time passed I grew more prolix and more conscious of what (and how) I was writing. This led me into a long period of introspection when I questioned my ability to cast a tale worth telling. The decline of my ability to sell a novella-length story to a magazine might have played a part. I attribute this both to my lack of imagination and the declining interest of editors to use up that much space for long pieces.
"Write short!" Schmidt encouraged me, and so I did, which resulted in a LOT of 15K stories that I then had to edit down under seven thousand words to make them salable. It was a lot of work for few rewards, at least at first, but eventually I re-learned the secret, began to write shorter drafts that required less editing and, eventually, managed to sell a string of shorts. At the same time my trunk continues to grow, overwhelming my list of published tales.
Seeing my short works being published is nice, but I still feel that commercially publishing more than a single novel would be an accomplishment. That's why I'm trying to finish the novels-in-development instead of adding more stories to my growing collection of unsold ones.
Someone recently suggested that I ePublish my unsold novellas and novelettes, but my past experience with ebooks makes me doubt that I'd realize any decent income from those. Maybe they were just that poorly written or lacked publicity or were simply lost among the millions of other works - who knows?
ePublishing is so confusing.
#SFWpro
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