m. c. de marco

Charlie Jane Anders reveals 12 Secrets To Being A Super-Prolific Short Story Writer at io9. Unnumbered but still lurking there in the introduction is the classic story-a-week advice. Also of note are secret #6, share one of your worlds with yourself, and #12, write to different markets.

My shortest story yet was published today at Thaumatrope, an sf/f/h twitter fiction magazine. I dimly recall submitting it, apparently in response to a call for steampunk and/or holiday stories, but I figured Bad Elf had killed little Timmy and buried his body in the slush pile.

To submit your own 140 characters of immortal speculative prose, all you need is a twitter account.

I was pointed to A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing via a mailing list. It comes with this handy summary of the past five hundred blog posts. Some of the advice struck me as much deeper than the topic of writing itself:

Know When To Quit

The measure of a human being is what makes them finally give up. The stronger the person, the more they can take.

Alexandra Sokoloff asks What’s your structure? I need to write a short story by the end of the month, but it still has no plot. Fortunately, short story structure is simpler than novel structure: just seven points.

I took December 1st off, but according to Alexandra Sokoloff, I don’t deserve a break from my novel until it’s actually finished. I repented yesterday and went back to my novel, and also redeemed my 50% off coupon for Scrivener.

I’m not sure I’ll be doing any of the other things suggested on my I Wrote a Novel, Now What? page.

Here’s a link I didn’t get a chance to post during the NaNoWriMo madness: Scott Westerfeld’s tip on using Scrivener for pace charts:

Now, you may ask, what in the world is a pace chart? Basically, it’s any method you use to track the ups and downs of momentum in your book, the shifts from action to conversation to tension. Like all meta-docs, a pace chart allows you to step back from the trees of your text and see the forest.

I finished my 50,000 words early this morning, having reached the midpoint of the novel by a route that was not quite the one indicated in my phase outline.