Thursday 10 April 2008

Crawling out of the graveyard...

Woo-Hoo! According to a posting on the SF Reader Forum, the anthology Strange Worlds of Lunacy is 100% finished and should be available to buy on Amazon really, really soon. I'm so excited. I feel as if this is my first publication. I stopped submitting/writing short stories about 7 years ago to concentrate on writing novels and then about two/three years ago my writing came to an almost stop (with no more than 20,000 words a year, written in half-hearted dribs and drabs). All these years later I feel like a different (hopefully improved) writer and hence the feeling as if this is publication number one. Wow, how long winded can one person be to simply say - WOO-HOO, I'm excited.

In other news. Did a little tidying up of 'The Poisoned Apple' (for the uninitated - my children's novel) over the weekend and added about 2,500 words. All I need to do now is finish that darn synopsis, write the query letter and send it out there... Wherever there may be.

I have completed the first draft of my story, The Graveyard of Dead Vehicles, which I intend to submit to the Wolfsong Anthology. It needs the usual tidying up and the reference to 'blood' toned down. A note of what the publisher doesn't want from their submission guidelines: "Really bloody horror. Violence is ok if it is necessary for the plot, but splatter and gore isn’t." I need to find a way to reference the death of the MC's wolf without smearing it's blood all over the manuscript.

2 comments:

K.C. Shaw said...

How do you make something gory without buckets of blood? I guess it's all in the actual descriptions of the violence. Good luck with the story!

Jeff Parish said...

Besides, blood makes a manuscript hard to read. All the words run together and the pages stick together. Ick!

Good luck, and I trust in your skills!