Blog Post No.
My first story submission to an open call was rejected. I’m not surprised. I wrote it last minute, it was for a horror collection, and I struggled to make the story any scarier than intense. It would have been nice if it had made the cut, though. I was happy with the idea, if the execution was a bit lacking. Plus, even though it wasn’t a big payday or anything, the little bit of extra cash would have been a tiny boon to my current focus on financial goals.
Blog Post No. 514
I’m a little embarrassed at how long it took me to get back into the edits on the Invasion Novel, but I’ve finally started to go over Christian‘s notes. As I suspected (and worried about) he had a few big picture suggestions that will really make the book better. The problem is that now I have to make those changes which involves going through the whole novel and making sure I connect all the dots so it makes any kind of sense.
Blog Post No. 513
I might be off work again soon and I don’t know for how long it will be. Hopefully the time off will help kick start me back on the Invasion Novel edits. I really need to get over the hump on that one. I’m so tired all the time from the state of things at work. And from being an adult in a world seemingly crumbling. That’s the thing about the world, though. If you get out of your own narrow perspective, you’ll see a lot of similar events have happened many times over. We’re not that special.
Blog Post No. 512
This blog is/has never been intended as a source for real information. I’ve never intended it to by any more than a place for me to keep writing regularly and maybe be a place of interest for people who like my books. (And a place for my parents to keep up on my life). I’ve hinted at how I write and I suppose that could be seen as helpful to some folks. Every writer has their own way of doing things (different schools of thought so to speak) but there’s lots of overlap.
Blog Post No. 511
I work a lot of early mornings, a few later evenings, and not a lot in-between. It means having to get up extra early (mostly to avoid rushing) and dealing with the dreaded cl-open (closing one night an opening the next morning). Working any shift comes with positives and negatives (though nothing is as bad as a mid-day shift). I tend to like to get my work over as early as I can so I can have as much day as possible before bed, but evenings have a special quality of quietness (even with a building full of people dancing to loud music or sitting through a class). Continue reading “Empty Streets”
Blog Post No. 510
This is going to be another post about the day job. I know that I’ve talked a lot about it in the past year or so, but part of writing is all the stuff you do that allows/prevents you from writing. I have a day job to pay for general living expenses since I’m currently not making any money writing. Having expenses paid for by having a job that’s not nine-to-five allows me to write. On the other hand, the job is sometimes more than nine-to-five for weeks at a time and while I’m at work, it’s not always easy or advisable to not do work stuff, so it also prevents me from writing.
Blog Post No. 509
Just before I started to get back into editing the Invasion Novel (see last week’s post for details) I finished off a short story that I was writing for the specific purpose of submitting to an open call. Christian has had so many good things to say about Eerie River Publishing (the publisher that released Infested) and he’s been doing so well with selling short stories, that I was inspired to submit to one of Eerie River’s Open Calls. The thing is, it’s a horror publisher and the open call is for a horror story. Which would be great if I wrote horror stories.
Blog Post No. 508
If you thought I was done talking about the Invasion Novel just because I finished it (and maybe suggested that I wouldn’t be talking about it as much) you were dead wrong. I’ve just been in a holding pattern waiting for Christian to wrap up the first review of the chunky book and working on short stories in the interim. (I’m just finishing off the last one that I had started since I’d like to submit it for a collection at the end of the month).
Blog Post No. 507
Back when Adventure Worlds was just a blog for some want-to-be writers to post stories as we practiced our writing, the original group was about on the same footing. Christian probably written the most up to that point on a separate blog, but none of us had anything published, self pub or otherwise. That was back in 2013, nearly a decade ago. Continue reading “The Longer Path”
Blog Post No. 506
It’s been about a year since I was first called back to the day job. I was off for over a year from mid March 2020 to August of 2021. I feel like I did alright in that time off. I released the third and fourth novellas in The Synthetic Albatross series, I wrote the majority of the Invasion Novel, and I did a lot of sitting around watching anime. When I first got the call, I was hesitant to go back. Unlike many folks, the time off had been good to me. I knew that it was only a matter of time before everything opened again, but it was still a surprise when it happened. I came back before the official return to work order was released. The new supervisor of my facility asked me to go to another facility she ran to start opening it back up for rentals.
Ben Van Dongen 