Many Stories on the Go…

I have so many stories on the go, now, mostly because I got most of my grading done in a flurry of activity and all that’s really left is for me to:

  • read the final “stories” (or poems) submitted for my Creative Writing class,
  • sort out the attendance records (a bunch of attendance records are in sign-up sheet form, for group discussions where one of my classes was split in half and attendance-taking would have wasted precious classtime,
  • decide on and finalize participation/attitude grades,
  • review my Public Speaking students final self-evaluations, which are due on Sunday by email,
  • input everything into spreadsheets, and
  • enter all the grades into the system by 28 December.

That might sound like a lot, but I’ll probably get most of it done this afternoon, late tonight, and tomorrow morning. Likely I’ll end up dropping by the office and having one of the office staff input grades on the 27th.

This has turned my attention back to my neglected writing, and I have a number of short stories I’m hoping to hammer into shape in the next couple of weeks–including one I’d like to have drafted enough to submit to my writing group on Sunday. That will be a hell of a feat, but we’ll see, maybe I can pull it off.

The stories I now have on the go are:

  • The Clockworks of Hanyang
  • The Tale of Baejjanggi and Gaemi, or, The Bernoulli War
  • The Brewsters
  • Alive, at the Village Vanguard

The themes and content of these stories are rather disparate, but I don’t think this is a bad thing at all… in fact, it’s cool because I can jump from one story to another as I run out of steam. Of course, this is slowing down my process for getting each one done, but at the same time, I think I’m getting all three to move forward at a much faster pace than I otherwise would, and with a kind of focused momentum that might otherwise take me a while to build up.

But by Sunday at the latest I need to get one of those stories drafted, so I can submit it for critique at our group’s next critique session. And that means picking one and focusing on it…

Singularity-styled disaster in a steampunky Asian city? A post-ecopocalypse brewery’s struggle to keep their community outfitted with potable fluids? A time-traveler’s curious encounter with his musical hero? A bizarre economic-warfare story set after the death of all (traditional) biological life on earth?

Wow, those all sound way less fun and interesting than they actually are.

Then there’s the novel planning I should be doing, and the pitches I need to write, and the drafting, and the drafting, and… well, other stuff I need to do around the house, too.

But it’s a good busy.

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