I started out the month by attending some writing sessions at OSFest 7. Regardless of your writing level, there is always something to learn by attending writers' discussion panels. During one of the panels, the 2014 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Conference was brought up.
I mentioned it to my wife and she thought it looked like something I should attend. So I was like, whoa, that's why I married you. I signed up for the conference right away and then redirected my focus to prepare for the conference.
In preparation, I finally finished a synopsis of my novel that I'm mostly happy with, and devoted most of the month to rewriting the parts that needed rewriting. It's been good, but it's also been hell. Major revisions are hard, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
On the short story front, I didn't work on anything new, but I did resubmit a few stories. Of eight submissions, I received two acceptances, two personal rejections, and one form letter. The two accepted stories should be published around December. My short story, A Reunion in Cloverbrook, was published this month in Under the Bed magazine, and hey, I got a cover mention, so that's always cool.
As for other stuff, I posted twenty-five blog posts, which isn't bad considering I took a break from daily posts to focus on the novel. I also posted five flash stories on Theme of Absence, from a variety of great writers and you should check them out :) And speaking of Theme of Absence, I stepped the site up to a token-payer in order to increase the number and quality of the submissions. It's working so far. I'm still really enjoying the site and hope to continue to watch it grow.
So normally I do a separate post to list my monthly goals, but I don't want to do that for September because at the moment I have no idea what my goals will be for September. A lot of what I'll be working on in the next month hangs on the conference. As part of the conference, I'll be having the first 20 pages of my novel workshopped, two pages of a WIP critiqued by a panel of authors, and a meeting with an agent.
In other words, I'll have a whole hell of a lot to think about when I return from Denver.
So until then, bare with me if I don't post as often as I have in the past. I'm planning to return to a daily schedule in mid-September, but I will continue to post Five Links Friday every week, as well as the author interviews, and the new stories on Theme of Absence.
Check back when you can and wish me luck with the conference. And have a great month!
Image by Kevan
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