A good week to get published…
It’s been a good week on the writing front. Well, the publishing/feedback front of this multi-pronged battle anyway. The actual writing for the week has been disappointing–trying to get back up on the horse after the mad dash of last minute novel editing for ABNA has been difficult.
It was confirmed earlier in the week that my short story, “Spider Without a Web,” will be published in the April issue of Abyss & Apex. This is my first prose sale ever, so it’s a big fucking deal, as our Veep has been known to say. (Strangely enough, I’ve been paid for prose twice before, some *mumble-mumble* years ago, but those were for awards, not for publication.) I am beyond excited and will post a link as soon as it goes live in a few months.
The second bit of goodness will take some explanation. A few years ago I joined the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (thankfully, the name is shortened to OWW). In fact, I got some good feedback for early drafts of “Spider Without a Web” during that first stint of membership. But I let my membership lapse because I was alternating between working on my novel and despairing at the futility of this writing endeavor. Having finally finished the first draft of that novel months before, in December I decided that I really needed some feedback before deciding how to proceed with it. So I re-joined the OWW and uploaded the first few chapters for critique. The response was generally positive, which led to my having the confidence to begin querying agents–although I put that on hold to give the ABNA a go first.
Monthly, the OWW chooses up to four submissions as Editors’ Choices. They tend to be some of the better selections on the workshop at the time, and in addition to the honor, the choices are critiqued by one of their panel of published writers and/or editors. One of those authors is Elizabeth Bear, who has written and had published about a thousand books in the last decade and who is a brilliant effin bloggist.
(Urban Dictionary suggests that “bloggists” are paid and “bloggers” are not. But blogger is a platform so doesn’t sound right describing a person who blogs. Ahem. Where was I?)
About three weeks ago, the OWW sent me a note that one of my novel chapters had been chosen for an Editors’ Choice the next month. Which meant that by the time I had the feedback, I would have already submitted to ABNA. In retrospect, that was probably for the best, because I would have either been locked up with indecision about how to fix the first chapters, or I would have made a complete mess of them instead. The book is off to ABNA, and today I got the critique from OWW. By Elizabeth Bear. Exactly who I’d been secretly hoping for. My heart leaped, it did. She had some reasonable criticisms of the structure and content that will have me beating my head against the manuscript in a few months. But the review was overwhelmingly positive. It overwhelmed me, anyway.
Yeah, it’s been a good week.
Now back on the gorram horse…