Writing Report April 26, 2020

My writing schedule runs very erratically this month due to family obligations and household / garden chores that need attending.

Soon-ok’s mother died of COVID-19 on April 18, and while we’re coping as best as possible it is not an easy time for her, especially since social distancing restrictions disrupt what would be the normal funeral and grieving processes.

I’m able to do some writing, mostly essays which you’ll see here, and a few of my short-short fictoids.

The fictoids are easy to write in the irregular schedule I’m facing; when my creative juices are flowing I can knock out 3 - 5 in a single sitting.

SquareSpace lets me load posts well in advance, so I’ve got fictoids loaded up for weekly posts through the month of June 2021.

I also spent a big hunk of the last three days loading up my tumblr Things I Do When I Should Be Working which is where all my Instagram fictoids go after they first run there.  Tumblr only allows 300 posts in the queue at any time, so two or three times a year I go in and add a couple of hundred.  I’m queued up through January 10, 2021 so there will always be fresh daily updates.

(I should explain what I mean by a “fictoid”.  It’s a short-short work of fiction, either primarily prose that runs under 1000 words [and more typically 250-400], or an image with funny [hopefully] dialog or captions.  I have occasionally combined the two forms as you can see in the image above.)

I’m giving serious thought to cutting way back on short story submissions to paying markets in the future.  I have several longer works I want to do (including finishing up the chronicles of Q’a despite the recent misfire) and don’t see the cost effectiveness of writing short fiction (i.e., 1,000 - 8,000 words) that takes years to find a venue and pays (at best) only hundreds of dollars.

My reasoning is thus:

• Prose fictoids satisfy my creative itch very nicely for many of the ideas I have, especially those that can’t sustain a longer narrative.

• There are at best 5 - 7 decent paying markets for short form sci-fi / fantasy / horror and fewer still for short crime / mystery / thriller.

• I actually spend more time researching markets and making submissions than I do writing the actual stories themselves (yeah, I know:  “It shows.”  Har-dee-har-har).

• Newer writers need the opportunity for profit and exposure more than I.

• So to that end, less focus on short stories (as opposed to fictoids), certainly less chasing after steadily decreasing markets.

I’ll doubtlessly check what’s available over the upcoming months to see if there are any new anthologies / markets that would be good fits for existing material, but it’s going to stop being a major focus.

Those of you who see me posting on Facebook and Twitter may wonder why I do that instead of focusing more on my writing.

As David Gerrold points out, most of what a writer does is research in some form or another, and the Facebook / Twitter accounts expose me to a lot of ideas / stories / reports I’d otherwise miss (Magic Realism Bot alone is a never ending source of story prompts).

I also get to hear (well, read…) directly from many otherwise disenfranchised voices in various minority communities, and that window of understand is priceless.

Additionally, Facebook / Twitter gives me a chance to do rough first drafts of arguments I develop more fully for the various essays I post, so the time spent responding isn’t actually lost.

Consider it more like a jazz musician’s improvisational riffs before settling down to some serious composing.

The long form works in my hopper won’t fit comfortably in standard genre bins (exceptions like Q’a aside).  One will be able to make the argument that this is sci-fi because it involves a scientific gimme, or that is a romance because the blossoming relationship between two characters is germane to the actual plot, but it’s equally arguable they aren’t in any particular genres because they’ll steer away from typical genre focus.

What’s the difference? 

Well, put Stephen Vincent Benet’s “By The Waters Of Babylon” next to Nelson S. Bond’s “The Magic City” and sunnuvagun they’re both virtually the same story but Benet’s doesn’t focus on pulp concerns the way Bond’s tale does.

There’s something about Benet’s story that transcends genre boundaries and speaks much deeper to our souls while Bond’s story -- an excellent and exemplary tale in and of its own right -- never really escapes the sci-fi box.

Benet found a story that spoke in his voice.  Bond found a genre to speak in.  

Small difference, you say? 

I don’t think so.

One’s exploring new territory,
the other’s setting up camp in a park.

That audiences today and read it and appreciate it comes from the success of sci-fi as a genre in permeating pop culture with heretofore “nerdy” concepts and concerns.

Ultimately, there’s only one genre I write:  Buzz Dixon stories.

© Buzz Dixon