Update about 1300 hrs: Critiquing session is over. Four stories critiqued including one of my own and the bottom line is that I failed to deliver the promise in this one. It should be mainstream and thus I need to remove the skiffy wallpaper and I need to better develop two non-viewpoint characters MUCH better than I have. This one missed the mark but I believe I can get it back on target. I probably will not attempt to rewrite it until I'm home unless I'm really, really stuck.
All weekend, the stuff just wasn't there. False starts and nothing really good. Today -- two stories chomping at the bits to be told. Damn, it! Queue up and do it properly, will 'ya? Sometimes I don't know which is worse... two stories competing for my attention such that they overlap one another or that loud silence echoing through my mind.
And yet another update: I met with Tananarive Due at 2:00 since she'd had an opportunity to see one of my stories and none of us wanted all the meetings bunched up as they were last week. We talked primarily about revision as I have major problems with revision and yes, I'd talked to Sean about this the previously week. Little did I know that Jennifer was going over there at 3:00 to talk about revisions and then Angel... the same thing. At any rate, I rewrote the critiqued story rather than begin a new one. It's now going to sit in my drawer for a week and then I'll look at it with fresh eyes and do only minor tweaking.
What you can't do well... practice!
One thing I've been doing with revisions is rewriting the entire story rather than tweaking. The story written was one that I doubt can ever sell, but I do think I'm starting to get a better grasp on some details. I ignored the rules of prose in this one and let the story tell itself. It didn't work great but I began with the small child and grew up into the young woman's voice. This does not work as fantasy. It needs to be mainstream and it will never sell. But I'll have it for me and it's essentially an extrapolation of everything I ever felt about my father's Stetson hat. I suppose it's silly... but that hat always meant something to me because it was so different from everyone else's. And then I finally got up the nerve to ask mother why he wore this style of hat in an area where no one else wore anything like that. Her answer [drumroll] is that Father thought the little hats looked silly on top of his head. He was a big man and a little hat (he thought) looked silly. Cowboy hats didn't. And father didn't give a whatever what anyone else thought about his appearance. He suited himself.
But then again, sometimes the answers aren't always as grand as our imaginations. At least that story allowed me to let go of some inhibitions and take chances. It was a stretch.
Still no news on Sable. It's driving me mad.
Several members of the group went off to dinner but I lost so much time to rewriting and wanted to catch up on critiques so I stayed behind. Last weekend, I recorded the names of the people whose stories we were critiquing and then critiqued the wrong stories for three of them. Argh! Fortunately, I had already printed out critiques for two of those and read the third quickly. It was still embaressing. Thus, I'm insuring I at least READ every story in the stack.
So here it is about 2100 hrs. and I haven't yet dived into either one of the two story ideas perculating. I learned I received two rejections from Gardner while I was gone and thus need to update my submission list shortly and then send them elsewhere.
The story that I could see so earlier today now eludes me. I don't know if it's because I spent so much time critiquing that the vision vanished or if I'm just too cotton-picking tired to be creative. I know the next two things I want to write. I just don't know how to tackle them Both are after-the-holocaust stories. Thus, I've been working on background, finding the right names, research, etc.