Tag: correspondence course
Der Long Ridge
So you can see I was frustrated before — well, not frustrated per-se but I mean I was just a bit intimidated by it all — as I was reading through one of the books assigned to me through my writing course (The Best of the Magazine Markets 2003 edition) as part of Assignment 5…
I am in no way confident about this and am ready to do it over if need be – though I have the basis for the story in my head and could try to complete it now if I wanted to. This assignment is a two parter though – I don’t send the story, just the opening and a synopsis and some markets I would submit to.
Markets – blah. You wouldn’t believe how ridiculous I felt when I found one of those markets, thought it was a match, and saw who put this friggin’ thing out… Signs – yeah, right…
at any rate, I’m going to get the new assignment out in the mail tomorrow. That’s good, I really don’t want it hanging on my shoulders for the time being. The other good news — well, sorta good news — with my writing is I took another chance with a previous assignment and submitted Thank God for Arthur to Glimmer Train’s short story contest. Of course, I won’t find out how things go with that until the new year, but at the same time – it’s worth a shot. I still have another month to go before I find out how badly Conflicting Affections did in their very-short-story contest.
I should be more optimistic though — 1200 bucks for first prize is reason to remain optimistic. Same with the 1200 I would get in the Short Story contest if I came in first place there as well…
Not that’ll happen… but I’ve got to try to keep positive with some things in life if life won’t afford it to me elsewhere.
Der Long Ridge and contested "Affections"
So as I stated in a previous entry that I got assignment 3 back on Saturday. After pinning Sunday and writing my entry for Monday on and off during the day before publishing it Monday morning… Well, I got back in the saddle with writing. Not writing, per se but editing.
Assignment 4 is due to be 1000-2000 words and I thought that there were ways to achieve that without trying to write a story fresh from scratch… even though I have a few concepts jotted down in a notebook I now can’t find, and plenty of stories I started but never finished, saved to my computer.
Back to the topic — Assignment 4. I decided to take a stab at editing “Thank God for Arthur” down to within the parameters… I was intimidated when I started — Seeing the unedited version of the story is 2791 words… Trimming 791+ words looked to be a task.
And yet, after just two simple passes over the story — I’m down to 1980 words… Pretty hot shit! I think it could be submitted as is. I’ll go over it again before printing out a copy and trying to spot errors in that before throwing out my final copies for the class.
Tres cool, no?
Meanwhile, I was looking around late last night on Pif Magazine while pinning and trying to find a local magazine to submit an edited Assignment 3 to… I stumbled across a writing magazine called Glmmter Train and decided to take a risk — a 10 dollar risk — and submit my edited version of Assignment 2 to their Very Short Fiction contest with a handsome 1200 dollar first place prize. Then again, I don’t know if they’ll even consider a story under 1000 words :(.
Maybe it was wrong of me to just dive in without researching Glitter Train much… but the hell with it — what did I have to lose (besides 10 dollars)? What do I have to gain?
Musical Justifications
I didn’t get to sleep last night until… well. this morning. It must have been 5 AM when I finally conked out. Pretty shitty if I do say so myself. I woke up around nine and stayed in bed until 10…. And yet I am still going strong right now without the urge to nap? WTF is up with that shit, y0?
Today I have politics on my mind a good bit. I haven’t talked about the WMD’s or much at all about the war in general since military operations started in Iraq. Of course, EVERYONE who has ever read this journal and knows me knows that I am against the war and think it’s unjustified. Well, the administration is continuing musical-justification for the war and now is stating that 9-11 is the reason why the United States attacked Iraq.
Give me a fucking break.
To say 9-11 justified the war is to say that any time someone acts suspiciously then you have every reason to kill that person in order to protect yourself. I mean, if I am walking down the street and someone is wearing baggy pants and looks intimidating, do I have the right to shoot the bastard on site because I am afraid? No. The White House is justifying everything that it does through 9-11 and it’s saddening that people actually believe it.
At any rate, Assignment 3 for my correspondence course is in the mail and on it’s way to the Lou-one and I still have bad bad feelings about the assignment. I sent him a copy of the Times article about me from last year as well as Re Elect JF’nK (he’s a Hudson Valley Renegades fan and they have a soft spot for Joe up there). I don’t know, i just feel really odd about it.
Oooh, before I forget to add this: have any of you been having problems with pop-up ads in Windows? I don’t mean pop-up ads while you are surfing web pages… I mean static messages that appear out of no where while you are online. You will want to look at this nifty little remedy to get rid of those pesky little fuckers. Windows Messages suck ass.
