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Sunday, November 26, 2017

Title Woes Part the Millionth

As planned, I've put the novella aside for now, and I started the anthology submission. I've frequently said here that titles either come to me right away or they don't. For this short story...I got nothing. Nothing good, anyway.

Okay, maybe I shouldn't say I have nothing, as I have been brainstorming a few ideas with friends. A lot of what I came up with just seems so generic, though, like it could apply to a hundred other stories. Also listed in my criteria was that I don't want the title to give away any major plot points. Unfortunately, with a ~5K word story, there's not a whole lot to go on except major plot points.

But then I realized something: Does a title matter as much in an anthology? I mean, obviously I do want something better than average, but if it does get accepted, it's probably not likely that the title of my story will make or break whether or not a reader buys the book. I guess it also depends on how people read anthologies—do they start from the beginning and blaze right through, or do they start with the title that grabs them the most and then jump around? (In what should come as a surprise to no one, I'm a "start at the beginning" person.)

I don't have a good answer. Right now, the frontrunner is "Another Hero". Which, yeah, I know. Snooooooore. It's not set in stone, and I still have some time to figure it out. At least I won't be kicking myself too much if I can't come up with anything better.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Multi-Tasking (or maybe not so much)

So I've been plugging away at the novella-in-progress. Not as quickly as I would have hoped, but it's moving along. I'd given myself the tentative goal of finishing the first draft by the end of 2017. It would have been a stretch, and I'm not sure I would have succeeded, but it was within the realm of possibility.

But then! (And this is a good excuse, I swear!) Every so often I remember to check my usual spots for anthology submission calls. Admittedly, it's been a long time since I submitted anything like that. With the calls I see, usually one of two things happens: either the theme/content doesn't interest me that much, or by the time I see the call, the deadline/word count combination is near impossible. 

Last week, I finally stumbled across something that caught my interest, had a short-ish word count requirement (2K - 8K words, though 3K - 7K is preferred), AND the deadline isn't until February 1, 2018. Woo hoo! Totally manageable! I can do that!

Except...I'm in the middle of this novella. And I'm sure I've said dozens of times on here that working on simultaneous projects isn't really my thing. But new shiny fun submission call!

My plan is to finish up this current chapter of the novella, and then knock out the short story. It might not be the speediest "knocking out", but I'm confident I can get it done well before the deadline. I already have my idea and my outline, so I'm hoping everything will go smoothly. And once that's in, I can get back to my novella and hopefully pick up some momentum again. Wish me luck on my multi-tasking!