I've finally started on another story, it's been a couple weeks since I've really worked on one. I decided that I'd like to write a short series of stories that all have the same main character, Ryan Ryback, the main guy from my story "This Devil's Song." And all the stories will deal with music, and they're all horror.
The one I started recently might end up getting scrapped. I wrote over 1100 words, but then I realized it doesn't deal too much with music yet. Maybe I'll work music in to it yet, but I don't know. I like the basic idea, but I'm having a problem visualizing the ending. I've got two ways to go with it, and I'm not crazy about either.
I would like to write maybe 4 stories with Ryan as my main character, and then write a batch of stories that tie in--they'd still involve music, but be with different characters. Maybe in one story someone is listening to one of Ryan's songs on the radio. Maybe one story is about a band opening for Ryan. I haven't decided yet. But I like the idea of mixing two different arts and music. They're both so creative and go hand in hand.
WRITING WEBSITE OF THE DAY: In the comments in the post below, Will asked about a website he and I were talking about. The site is Duotrope, and while I've used it before, I really got to exploring it yesterday, and discovered more of what it can do.
It's a great place for finding markets, first of all. You give it the search criteria, and it makes a list for you. It encompasses every genre, not just speculative fiction. IT can narrow it down by story length, or payscale, or genre. Very handy. Even has secondary markets that don't quite fit the criteria, but might be helpful for you.
Second, it has a submission tracker. You have to register with them, but it's free. You tell them your story title, where you submit it to, and the date. They put it on your chart, tell you how many days it's been out, and what the current average response time is for that magazine. It's great! For my story "This Devil's Song," I've been expecting a response back by today--the Weird Tales response time says 2-4 weeks. But Duotrope averages out all the responses that people record with them, and tells me that the average response time right now is 58 days. Now, that's not good news, but at least I know to expect a slightly longer wait.
2 hours ago
3 comments:
Yeah, I know. I meant to only submit about four but once I started submitting, I couldn't stop myself.
I actually got a rejection back on the very first story I wrote, Don Lewis, but it's cool. A couple of those places are paying markets. I'm very hopeful about Lycanthropy. It's one of my best stories and the market is a paying one. So in a few weeks or a month or whatever I may be pocketing $25 and a copy of Lychantrope. But who knows.
Good luck, I hope they take it. I'm finding that I'm having to go back and do a lot of editing on my old stories before I submit them. Like you said the other day, my style has matured a lot in the last couple years, and I'm a littel embarassed by how poor some of my old stories are.
Yeah, I don't mind rejection. Ain't no thing. Hopefully you can find the time to get your stuff submitted. What I did was first find a bunch of places I wanted to submit to, bookmarked them, then read through each site and decided which story of mine would have the best chance and then submitted.
Also, happy Father's Day to you, sir.
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