Writing Stuff

I haven’t posted about my writing, but that doesn’t mean nothing’s going on.

In fact, as I’ve already mentioned on Facebook and Twitter, one of my stories from last year is a finalist in the AnLab poll for best short story published in Analog during 2017. The competition is stiff, of course, but that just makes it more flattering. (It’s my second year in a row to be a finalist in this vote.) All the stories are available at the link above: feel free to read them and vote for mine the ones you like best. 

Beyond that, you can see in the left sidebar that I’ve added a project tracker to my site. Mostly, that’s just a way of tracking how I’m doing with some projects. I’ll be adding a few more things to that, though, since I have quite a lot of projects on the go at the moment. 

That said, here’s a vague picture of everything going on in the writing department:

• I’ve collected a fair amount of feedback on the novel I drafted last year. (Not everyone’s posted me yet, so I’m holding off a bit more, but I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what needs to get done.) The bad news is that it’s going to be a fair bit of work. The good news is that a lot of the feedback was very positive about the good stuff, and very consistent about the problems. That makes things easier… especially since the problems as others saw them line up pretty well with the problems as I saw them.
• I’m also working on expanding a novella I wrote into… I think a short novel. Not 1970s paperback short, mind you, and it’s a bit of a weird book: some seem to think a teenaged protagonist makes a book YA, but I suspect this book is at once too dark and too NSFW for any YA publisher. I could be wrong, though.  
• I’m trying to get a couple of short stories done in the next little while, and then I’ll be submitting work around. I always find sending out short fiction draining, but I have enough of a backlog of unpublished work that it’s stupid not to be sending it out.
• My wife Jihyun is considering doing some translation of some specific Korea-related stories of mine, to see if we could publish a short book for the Korean market. 

And that’s just in the fiction-writing department.

I’m supposed to develop a screenplay for Jihyun to shoot sometime this year, and some projects are brewing in the RPG-writing department (including a big, exciting one!), none of which I can say much about.

Well, okay, I can say that I’m finalizing a short setting/adventure project titled “The Isle of Joy” (inspired by books like The Tempest, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Robinson Crusoe, and films like Rabbit Hole, Antichrist, and Kramer vs. Kramer) for independent publication as an OSR adventure module1, and also am returning to work on a collaborative project I’ve been working on with a friend , off-and-on, for quite some time). 

Beyond that, my head’s full of project ideas… time is the issue. And apparently a common one, too.