This weekend, we finished prepping the second short story we wrote for a specific call for submissions. This one had a limit of 12,000 words, which was a huge challenge. We decided to write a rough draft without obsessively checking the word count and pare down as needed when we were finished. As it turns out, we had to trim about 4000 words. Ouch…

But we were ruthless, and we did it, and the result is a tight story with a good pace. We’re both learning a lot about tightening up our prose by writing for these shorter calls, and I think it’s been good for us, overall.

Anyway, it’s finished and submitted, so now we have to wait until the deadline passes, which means we have a couple of months to wait and keep our fingers crossed.

For now, we’re taking a break before starting something new in order to tackle some revisions. We have a rough draft of a novel to revise and polish; it’ll probably be between 60-65,000 words by the time we’re finished revising. We also have another short story that we need to finish and pare down. Given we have rough drafts of two different works, one of which is novel-length, we figured we ought to hold off on starting anything new until we get what we have cleaned up. And we’ll definitely be running the novel past another set of eyes before we start prepping it for submission.

Coming up with ideas and getting them written quickly is definitely not our problem! Having enough time in the day is our problem. We’ve been writing together on a regular basis since 2004, so we’re pretty well-synced; it doesn’t take us long to generate ideas, characters, and plots, and once we start writing, the draft goes quickly. As a result, we’ve managed to complete two stories and a novel and have a third story almost finished since getting our first rejection letter back in January.

I found this image shortly after we received that letter, and it motivated me to stop angsting and get back to work. I think it’s still rather appropriate. 😀