Tag: long ridge writing group
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?
