story/poem a day mission

Hi

I signed up for NaNoWriMo -- then I thought -- what the hell? It makes more sense to write a short story or poem every day and send it to a paying market. So that's what I am trying to do (with one day off a week to account for nights out etc).

If anyone wants to join me we can post the name of the piece and the place we sent it. This will let other people know about markets and help motivate me. I wonder how long I will keep it up...

Any takers?

When do you do revisions if you're cranking out a story a day?

I don't have the time, creativity, or patience to do that, but maybe I'll try one thing a week. That's a good idea. I do keep a list of things I send to places and if they're accepted, what issue of the mag they're in, how much I get paid, etc.

i wish you luck. sounds like a challenge. I'd do it (and the nanowrimo thing) if i had more time to spare. but between grading and working on the novel, there is little left in spare time...although on the bright side, i'm only 6 chapters short of finishing...

then have to rewrite first three chapters
then have to revise
then have to revise again.
then have to let my wife read.
then revise it again.
damn, i'll never finish it...


writing would suck, if i didn't love it so much...
well, back to writing. page 211, here i come...

How about once a week then? If you guys are writing short stuff that should be doable. I also work full time and am trying to find a publisher for a novel... but most markets only want 1000-2000 stories on a specific topic and on the harder days there's poetry -- I can invent that on the 40 minutes I pend on a bus daily.

Pipe up if you will try and send a piece a week and I will pipe in with the the one I sent to the highest paying market. We can have Friday as reporting day.

could this be retroactive? ... lol ... i just sent one out a week or so ago...

maybe once a week, i could swing that. i have some stories idea i haven't gotten to. i could do one in a week, writing and revision. I'd do more, but i don't want to send them out without a least a once-over.

when do you want to mark the cutoff? Sundays (Nov 2, 9, 16, 23, 30)?

Sundays would be fine, any other takers?

I'll give it a try- even if they turn out funky it'll at least get me to create something once a week. Just have to find some markets...
Great idea!

Okay then. On Staurady I will open a new thread and on Sunday anyone inclined to can post about something they submitted in the previous week...

sounds good...


and we're off......

Sounds great! I usually do that anyway. Short stories and poems are written on the fly, and pretty much anything can inspire me. Though these works are usually pure crap, I've gotten quite a bit of good responses from some of my crap. So, don't be too quick to judge. Let your readers do that.

The better short stories, I find, I usually extend into full novels or scripts.

But the short story/poem a day thing is a good excercise. Keeps your mind active.

Writing this quickly is probably very good practice, but I wouldn't count on selling any of it to high-paying markets.

The easiest length short story to actually sell to print paying markets is 3,000-5,000 words, and even though the internet wants shorter stories by and large, it's still tough to find markets that pay and will take many stories shorter than 2,500 words. They may have less in their guidelines, but this doesn't mean they buy very short stories from the average writer.

I'm not sure what you mean by "topics" for short stories. Some magazines ask for topic stories, but not many, and a short story on a given topic is no easier to write well than any other short story.

I'm sold some stories to top magazines that were written very quickly, but this is the exception, rather than the rule. I've found the shorter somethng is, the more rewriting and editing time it often rrequries to make it a professional quality story.

I can certainly write a short poem in forty minutes to an hour, but making it a poem a paying magazine will accept is probably going to mean at least several rewrites and 25-40 hours of revision and editing. Up to a hundred hours on a longer poem.

The paying short story market is the most competative market in the world, and good isn't good enough. There's little room and relatively few markets for short stories, and an awful lot of extremely good writers making submissions. A short story has to be near perfect to sell to a good magazine, and this just isn't going to happen very often with stories written so quickly.

The poetry market is much the same. If you're talking good market sthat pay, poems written and submitted too quickly are far more likely to generate rejections, rather than sales.

I don't think a poem or short story a day is at all a good idea. One a week can be made to work, if you have enough time during the week for revision and editing.

Writing everyday is good, finishing projects is good, but quality can't be put on a timetable, and it's quality that sells. A poem or short story should be as perfect as the writer can possibly make it before being submitted anywhere.

It is one heck of a lot easier to write a quality 50K novel, or even a 100K novel, in a month, than it is to write a publishable poemm or short story a day, or even each and every week.

Where quality and competition are concerned, shorter is harder, not easier.