January, don't be cold, don't be angry to me

[venta]

This is a monthly bookkeeping post, keeping up with my new year's resolutions.

Mixed success. I've been getting along to bed earlier. I wrote in my resolution post "If I've had enough sleep, I get up when my alarm goes off." It turns out this isn't actually true. Of late I've woken up when alarm's gone off... and have laid around in bed, nice and awake, listening to the radio.

This is not a normal failure mode for me. Usually, either I'm too asleep to make sensible decisions, or I get out of bed. But it turns out that my early-morning self is even more determined to stay in bed than I'd thought. I attempted to trick me by arranging exciting breakfast (toasted potato cakes, since you ask), but it didn't work. More research needed.

I sent a short story off to the monthly Writers' Forum competition. I tend not to trust feedback from friends - I mean, they would be nice, wouldn't they? - so forked out the extra money for a proper critique from the Writers' Forum people. The critique was actually disappointingly short and (modulo a few very minor things) I didn't really agree with it :( Not sure yet whether the writer is wrong, or whether I am just resistant to criticism.

I spent quite a while trying to edit down a short story to be short enough to fit into a flash fiction competition, but failed - though I think it's the better for the editing. However, the story I did submit I wrote years ago. And all I've done this month has been prod vaguely at existing stories. So I think I might modify my resolution to say that my submissions shouldn't be from previous years' writing more than one month running.

The plan for this month is to write and submit something for this.

I do most of my reading on the train, and this month I've mostly been doing editing instead, or staring blankly into space daydreaming, or (latterly) wading through book 8 in Adrian Tchaikowsky's increasingly interminable Shadows of the Apt series.

I did discover that I could make an online wish-list on my local library's website, so have battled with their rather disappointingly crap search to collect together all the things I have been bidden to read. Almost all are available (though disappointingly, I can only get Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter in Polish!) so I ordered a couple in.

Then I finished off the Tchaikowsky on the way to work on Wednesday, and realised I had nothing to read (panic!) on the way home. Fortunately, I was meeting wimble for the evening and he came galloping up like the cavalry with a sack of books, having run down my list and scooped everything relevant off his own shelves. So I have managed to fit one book from my list into January - review to follow. I shall have to pick up the pace a little to get through 25 in year :)

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Paid feedback for writing stuff is generally a scam from what I've seen.

Happy to provide non-diplomatic criticism if that's useful to you.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I guess the thing is, at £5 per story I'm guessing that I'm perhaps not paying for more than (say) 15-30 minutes of the reader's time (I've no idea what the rate of pay is). So perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised.

This particular story is one I dispatched some years ago to lathany for comment; I'm not sure whether or not you might have already seen it at the same time. But thank you for the offer, I may well take you up on it soon! I'm always very reluctant to foist stories on people for criticism as I hate doing it myself (at least, I enjoy the reading but hate trying to say useful things about them).

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Well FWIW I wouldn't feel foisted upon. When lathany started writing stuff I ended up being her editor by default and got into the habit of being a bit more analytical about why I did and didn't like particular things. Unfortunately the main consequence of this is that I now roll my eyes at a lot of published writing, but it has advantages too.