Back to School

Today school started again for most of the local kiddos. One of my sons began today, the other will begin Wednesday. It feels great. I’m excited to be able to have my schedule back. I have writing to do, a lot of writing to do, and the summer is such a bad time for getting anything done for me.

Apart from the daily slow-motion disintegration of our democracy, it was a decent summer. Our plan is to leave California at the end of this school year, and move to Boulder, CO. So this “last summer in CA” was, predictably, a letdown. The truth is, “doing things” is largely meant for younger people without children. Most of what I did this summer involved my children, whether here in Alameda or in other places like Montana, Texas and different parts of California. I require a structured day, generally like the ones before it, and then I have discovered I can be quite productive. With the uncertainty of travel, visiting family and simply the kids’ constantly changing summer schedules, it’s been much harder to focus and feel I’ve made progress.

My novel is still underway, of course. This week I will get back to it, after a couple of weeks, with the goal of completing my draft by Christmas. I have recently blown passed one hundred thousand words which, according to a word count chart I printed out and taped to my door, means I am approaching Russian novel territory. Oh, well. I have accepted that this first-ever novel attempt, which has been immensely interesting, amusing and challenging, after the first draft, will continue on for some time before I can show it to anyone or consider attempting to publish it. I have plans to revisit a shorter work in the spring—but also aiming for a novel—which I can hopefully keep narrower of scope than the sprawl I am contending with now.

I submitted one short story for publication, so far. I assume that it will not be published, of course, but there has to be a first one. Today I’m reviewing my other work to see if I have something I could submit for a contest for new writers I heard about on Reddit. Editing feels very tiresome, but once I actually look at work with my editorial hat on, it feels less so, more obvious.

I have written one story this summer—in addition to the novel work—and I look forward to having time, or taking time, to get back to that form, which is quite satisfying. Also, I simply need shorter work if I am going to submit more stories to various publications. The contest, for example, is wide open content-wise, although they use the term “literary fiction” which usually means they despise genre much like snot-nosed Stanford grads despise the San Francisco homeless, but I don’t really care. I’ve got what I’ve got; I love genre; I don’t really know or much care what is considered “literary.” My problem is length. The contest specifies a 6000 word limit, which is honestly quite generous compared to a lot of what I’ve seen in my research. But, still, maybe only half or fewer of the things I have written so far are actually under 6K. So, editing time.

It’s a tough call in some cases, though. For example, I want to do something with a scifi satire I wrote. If I chopped off the last two-thirds of it, I’d have a decent submission on its own. But it’s still 7K plus. And then, I like a lot of the stuff that comes after that stopping point, although the scope of the story changes dramatically. I wouldn’t throw it away, of course, and I could probably judiciously cut a thousand words from the first section and submit it, but it feels like a different thing than what it is. Another story, which is almost right at 6K and could easily be tightened up by a thousand words, I daresay, is more of a first chapter of a long-planned novel than a story in its own right.

Then there’s the scandalous satire I wrote last month about Amy Coney Barrett. That fits the word count, but I feel like it might not be the right sort of thing for the contest. It’s hugely sarcastic and on-the-nose. And probably offensive to many.

So there are many decisions to make.