Keffy

everything i do is so fucking amazing that sparks are going to shoot out of your eyes

Month: July 2012

Yet Another Write-a-Thon Update

July 25, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Hey!

So, I finally finished a second short story draft, with what… a week and a half to go?

(No, you can’t read it yet, it’s terrible. No, you don’t want to, trust me.)

Basically, if I’m going to do this thing, I’m going to have to suck it up and finish drafts of all these miserable and abandoned stories — and do that WHILE taking the first two weeks of a super-condensed organic chemistry class.

Yes, because pacing myself was apparently too difficult of a concept. Whoops! But, I’m still going to make it, because a) it’s for Clarion and b) at this point, I’m so fucking tired of having no finished fiction that I don’t even care if these are terrible. I DO NOT CARE. That’s what rewrites are for!

ANYWAY. Besides the update, I have a reward for people who have donated!

If you have sponsored or pledged $15 $10 or more to my write-a-thon drive (or if you choose to do so before August 5) I will mail you a signed perfect bound dead-tree edition of the PDF I made last year. It contains four of my short stories: Advertising at the End of the World, Machine Washable, Bone Dice, and Daha’s Son. And illustrations! The PDF copy is available online, but I don’t sell the print version, so this is going to be a veeeery limited print run.

I’m on the wrong computer right now, so I can’t find the cover image complete with terrible font choice, so here’s the full image I used for the cover (I drew it in December 2010.)

 

And, either way, here’s the PDF (I kept forgetting to put it back up after I switched my site around:

four-stories

Thanks, everybody!

 

 

ETA: If you already sponsored for $10 or more, I’ll be in touch with you on August 5 or 6. Also, if you don’t want another book (I totally understand), then I won’t send you anything. 🙂

AUTHOR WEBSITES

July 17, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I still sometimes see people asking questions about author websites. Do I need one? What do I put on it? Who should I pay for it? Do I really need to blog? Do I need to social network facespacepintwitlr? Blah blah blah.

Okay, first, the obligatory HA HA, why would anybody take website information from a site as ugly as this one? (I don’t know.)

There are roughly a million billion sites that will tell you stupid minutiae about what your website should look like, and how to blog, and whatever. 99% of all that shit is optional. I won’t say that nobody cares about that stuff, but it’s not essential. I’m not saying that more advanced/complicated questions aren’t good. But sometimes I see websites that are full of all sorts of fancy bullshit but not the basics.

I don’t care how pretty your design is. Your website exists to tell people who you are and what you write. If it doesn’t do that, fix it.

You need:

a website
with your name on it
and a way to contact you
and a list of your published fiction (if you have any).

Website!

It does not have to be a fancy website. You can go to WordPress.com or blogspot, or even LiveJournal if you are feeling nostalgic for 2003. Try not to make your site look like it was designed in 1996. If you don’t know what means, just choose something like WordPress and use one of the free themes. It’s sufficient.

Name!

It does not need to be your legal name. It needs to be the name that you put (or intend to put) on your fiction. Recently, I went to an author’s site to try and figure out who the author was, since their Twitter account didn’t have their name attached. I had to dig through several pages of the site until I finally found a jpeg file of a book cover with the author’s byline. Their name was not on the main page, in the header, in their bio, or on the “about this blog” page.

Don’t do that. Make sure it’s visible on the main page of your site.

Contact!

Shit happens. Especially in slush piles. Your email provider can decide that the magazine you’ve submitted to is spam. You might fuck up and send a submission with no contact information. I don’t know. Name anything that could possibly go wrong when submitting a story. It’s happened.

Editors become very, very sad if they read a story, want to buy it, and can’t get into contact with the author. No, if you somehow forget contact info, good editors are not going to automatically reject the story. Why? Because if it’s worth publishing, it’s worth the (admittedly annoying) task of typing the author’s name into Google and sending an email.

It can also result in awesome stuff falling in your lap. Example: a few weeks ago I got an email out of the blue from an independent film producer who wanted to give me money and make a short film based on one of my stories. So that’s cool. I felt all validated about making myself easy to contact.

Bibliography!

List things you’ve had published (or published yourself). Link to everything that’s online. If I find one of your ancient stories in a back issue of a magazine, make it easy for me to find something more recent to read.

Okay? Okay. Everything else is optional, so stop freaking out about how some person is claiming that you ABSOLUTELY NEED an account in the current trendy social media site.

One down… five to go?

July 12, 2012 / / 1 Comment

AGH. I somehow always manage to forget that summer = BUSY. Usually this is because everything that I’ve promised to be involved with happens in the summer. You would think that I’d figure this pattern out at some point, but no.

So, what is up with the Write-a-Thon? I’ve written every day (although I missed clicking the button once or twice, oops). And, though I’m woefully behind, I have finally finished A Draft of A Short Story that turned out to be not so entirely Short — and really I would have been better off if I’d just said HAY GUYS IT IS NOVELLA.

Except, I didn’t, and instead I spent the time trying to cram a great big huge story down to a short story length. In the end, I have 6,666 words (yes, that many exactly) of a draft-nobody-else-gets-to-read. This is, incidentally, why I didn’t write a bunch of updates. I kept getting embarrassed after the end of week one that I hadn’t finished a short story yet.

But now I have! Even though I had real writer’s block as opposed to my usual problem, which is that I’m moping because I intensely dislike everything I write. I fixed that by writing on the Link light rail which is a surprisingly good place for me to write. I would do that every evening, but I’m worried the light rail people will freak out if I go to the airport and back for no reason except that I want to sit on the train.

So far I’ve raised $124 and I have $132 in pledges (which means I need to write faster.)

The little bar is turning GREEEEEEN.

This story is going to need a lot more work before I can send it out, sadly, if I get that far. But, the path to publication is littered with the eviscerated bodies of failed projects, so whatever.

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