Tag Archives: Writing

Writing Update – July 29, 2011

This has been an interesting week for me, as far as writing goes. Not only did I send out Feel-Good to the early access list and open preorders (you should buy it!), but I also submitted more of my writing to outside markets and had my first accepted story published.

The story I had published was a Twitter-length “nanofiction” at Nanoism. Here’s a link to the story on the Nanoism site, and here it is on Twitter. Nanoism was at the forefront of the Twitter fiction “boom,” and it’s one of the few venues for Twitter-length fiction that I know of that’s still operating. It’s great to have a venue for a unique format like this.

I’ve also had a flash fiction story declined twice this week (it was done personally, both times), and received some helpful feedback in the process.

I touched up the rejected story a bit and submitted it elsewhere, so I now have five stories “out there” waiting for responses.

My writing this week has been fairly productive. I finished a short story I’m really excited about, responded to several different prompts on TypeTrigger, and wrote the first week’s worth of 50-word stories for the start of Year Three at FiftyWordStories.com next week.

Hopefully next week brings some good news, in the form of more productivity and acceptances!

“Feel-Good”: Ready for Pre-Release!

I’ve put together the cover art for Feel-Good, and it’s now officially ready for pre-release this Monday!

The photo for the cover was taken by Rudoni Productions. You can see more of his work on his Flickr page.

Image by Rudoni Productions, used under Creative Commons.

In my previous post, I mentioned that the centrepiece story of the collection, which I have now titled Hands-On, had gotten just a little bigger than I’d originally intended. Well, not it’s even bigger. The final word count is just under 7,000. It took Larissa about 25 minutes to read the whole thing (and she liked it!). As I explain in the Introduction to the collection, Hands-On feels, to me, more like the opening couple of chapters to a novel than a short story. I’ve tried to make it as self-contained as possible, but it doesn’t seem to want to be self-contained, and who am I to tell it what it can and can’t be? Maybe it will eventually turn into something longer; for now, I think it’s still worth reading as a standalone.

So: Hands-On is definitely the central feature of the collection, but there’s plenty of other good content in there, too, and I think you’ll enjoy it all. I’ll be emailing early access copies of the collection to the people on the early access list this coming Monday, and creating a page where you can buy the collection as a pay-what-you-want download, as well.

I’ll have some more news about any special offers soon, and possibly some details on my future plans for these collections.

Flash Fiction: Living the Dream

Since it’s been taking me a bit longer than I hoped to get Feel-Good ready for release, here’s a story I just wrote at Six-Minute Story to hopefully hold you over for a bit. It’s called Living the Dream.


Image by Andreas Solberg, used under Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

Bobby had lived in his imagination as a child. Within the universe of his mind, he was an action hero, an iron-willed daredevil. He could meet any challenge, snatch victory from the jaws of any defeat, bravely pull off any stunt.

Now that he was older, he was learning more and more that he would probably never trade tracer bullets with South American guerillas, or infiltrate the secret Appalachian hideout of a band of communist child kidnappers, or balance on the hood of a car, guns blazing, while pursuing Somalian bank thief pirates across a perilous frozen lake.

But maybe, just maybe, he could still live those dreams through his words.