Showing posts with label
International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses.
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Showing posts with label
International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses.
Show all posts
Recently I came across an article in an AARP publication. A writer mentioned that retirement took all the edge off "writing for publication". His youthful "juices" were dried up. I feel the prune juice running out of me too and may soon need diapers. The dude in the AARP publication had made a living with his writing whereas all my poetry and short story publications have been in the literary world of non-paying little mags & small presses. My goal "to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine" before I die is all out of whack according to Jung who said that one ought to make money first and become philosophical in later life. I may have mentioned this in a previous post. Who knows? Seems to me I've been philosophical all my life, seeking the meaning to existence in my off hours.
An interesting aspect about writing speculative fiction concerns too little or not enough. Manning, as you know, is set 250 years in the future. I gotta surround the story with a future culture and that means I gotta decide how much information about the future to present to readers. Enough to keep them interested or too much and they get bored and quit reading?
By the way, I'm currently lunching on a smoothie: carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, frozen strawberries, banana slices, a touch of prune juice, vanilla almond milk, protein powder (since I left out walnuts) and three packs of sweetener. I swear, Granny Thomas, you can't mix up anything bad tasting when you chop it down to its atomic size.
Each day my progress on Delinquent Lives slows as I recognize all the intricacies built into the original and all the connective tissue that will have to be laid down to make for smooth transitions. Currently as I cut and paste segments I have to hope I don't lose my train of thought right in the midst of a cut and paste. My mind is not what it used to be in following small details.
Obviously, I'm approaching the reconstruction primarily to make the novel more readable for the lay reader who I imagine as very bright but not interested in a novel like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. The idea, remember, is to create a book that an agent might see his/her way to supporting, to write a book someone other than myself might publish. My friend Carl Tropea read Finnegan's Wake many moons ago, back in our hippy daze. I still recall how he enthused about it. I tried to read it myself but never finished it...as far as I recall.
I'm wondering how much my decade of not writing and working mostly on algebra has contributed to my seemingly clearer vision of the process of writing? Perhaps the alterations my brain went through to understand the schemata of the algebra problem altered my brain as far as it comes to patterning. Is that a correct use of the word schemata?
I'm so far back into the thorny writing thicket that I sent away for Writer's Market 2013 a couple of days ago. I also used Len Fulton's International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses in the past. I haven't mentioned those useful books because I was pursuing markets closer to home with the ambition to build local and expand later with a more recent record of successful publications of my poetry, short stories and essays. As I talk about these matters, I almost believe I'm going to succeed. I hope it's not like imagining I'm going to win the lottery whenever I weaken and buy a lottery ticket about every two years or so.
It's raining and 60 degrees outside today, and I'm writing at the Black Rock.
