April: A month in retrospect
Gardens, Gibberish, a bunch of links, and an upcoming publishing schedule
To my new subscribers, welcome—and to old friends, welcome back. It’s been quite a month here at ‘It’s For a Story’. If you missed any of my three (award-winning!!) entries for the 2024 Gibberish Writing Contest, you can read them here:
The Dead Zone: Suspense. (A chase scene, 2,009 words.) Not for the faint of heart or ’feared of sharks. My dad says it scared him more than Jaws did. Scored 21/27.
The Eye of Ra: Historical adventure/suspense. (A bottle episode, 2,121 words.) I’m told it gives The Mummy vibes. Scored 21/27.
Should You Choose to Accept It: A romance about spies who are also ex-lovers. (An argument, 2,021 words.) Have you ever wished that the romantic leads were worse at expressing their feelings? This one’s for you. Also, there’s Paris. Scored 27/27.
And I also managed to slip in the eleventh chapter of my WWII spy adventure serial, Poets and Chess Players.
#11: In Which In Which Fräulein Löwe Asks The Questions. Still reeling from the morning’s events, Polzin comes clean with Miss Löwe, and Dr. Weiss makes a dramatic confession.
What’s next? —well, we’ll get there.
But, first: flowers.
“April showers bring May flowers”—but our weather is a little ahead of the English standard, and April is for flowers here. Easter lily and wisteria at the beginning, jasmine and magnolia at the end, and all through the middle a succession of azalea, rose, dewberry, bridal wreath, and every kind of wildflower.
This is the first year I’ve really given much thought to growing flowers. Normally all I can think about is my optimized, breakneck plan to squeeze as much food production as possible into the time and space I’ve got. This plan never succeeds (obviously), and always ends with me feeling burnt out and guilty by July. Mr. H is much better at this: despite buying plants on a whim and never once consulting an almanac or worrying about whether he can get a second planting in, he accepts what I’d consider to be insurmountable losses with patience, and his side of the garden inevitably produces more overall. There’s a lesson in there, I guess.
Anyway, maybe I’m gaining a bit of perspective, or maybe it’s because all my eggplant seedlings died and I need something to make myself feel better, but I’ve been paying more attention to the blooms. Maybe next year I’ll plant something that I don’t expect anything back from but looking pretty.
I dunno, maybe beauty is worth it after all.
The Loose Cannon Hits Home
Speaking of patience and perseverance…
GWC ‘24 is now at an end, and it has been a phenomenal experience. I don’t know when I last crammed so much effort into my fiction. Running that gauntlet was worth it all the way.
Of course, maybe that seems easy to say when I came in first. However, I mean it when I say that it was never about beating out my fellow competitors: I really felt we were all competing side-by-side against ourselves. The support and camaraderie among this team was matchless and I have nothing but respect for their hard work, inspiration, and dedication to the craft. Not to mention the late hours and helpful insight contributed by
, , and the others in the judging room on a volunteer basis, for nothing but the joy of giving back. This round of applause is for you…I’m proud of myself for sharing my written work with my family for the first time. I’m proud of earning a perfect score in round 3. Those are the achievements that I’ll put up on my wall and brag about.
Here were my favorites from everyone else’s entries, by the way:
: In Search of a Friend or Why You Should Let Monsters Eat Your Pink Socks. I love the concept, the descriptions of the monster world, Brianna’s bravery on her quest, and Marv’s cheerful good nature all around. Alice Meredith does such wonderfully happy stories, and her worlds beg to be explored. : The Encircling Cells. In my opinion, a perfect showcase for Eric’s arresting prose—he has this way of turning an unexpected phrase and making it truly haunting. The monk Ruathen’s development throughout the piece is interwoven with the gradual worldbuilding, and he keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time.: Copycat. He’s just like Ted Bundy…I thought this was marvelously clever. Hanna writes great characters and there’s often this little twist to your expectations—for a few minutes there, she really did have me going. Everything in this piece rides on the narrator’s voice and, in my opinion, she nailed it. You can feel him turning in circles behind the bars.: The Scetis Valley. (Obviously, there has been a great void in my heart which only monastic stories can fill.) Ironically, I’m not very good at finding the words to analyze literature, and I’ve had a lot of trouble with this story in particular—which is frustrating because it was exceptionally impactful. If the image sort of icon is “written”, perhaps there’s also a kind of “icon” which is written more literally. The moment when the apparition is facing away from Euprepius…my heart felt that.And my lessons learned:
I can write to a deadline. It didn’t defeat me. I kept showing up and I made it happen.
I have a bad habit of assuming the reader knows what I am doing. I need to work more on foreshadowing, setting expectations, and finding an acceptable balance when it comes to giving background information.
How to use an em-dash. Y’all have been hiding this from me?? I’m legitimately curious how I made it through 18 years of school1 without it sinking in that there are two kinds of hyphens.
I certainly can write self-contained short stories, but it’s not as much fun as I usually like to have while writing. I’ll have to consider where I go from here with those; obviously, it’s the predominant Substack format for a reason.
I have no substitutes for structure. Shortly before the competition started, I discovered K.M. Weiland’s work on story structure and this was an absolute lifesaver. With stories this small, I rarely know exactly where they’re going until I’m about 50% in. I could not have pulled off the pivot without a roadmap.
The numbers are in, and background music is an unaffordable distraction while drafting. I will continue to use playlists while I’m editing, though.
All areas of my life run more smoothly when I do not try to read, write, or otherwise digitally socialize on the weekend.2 Actually, as little as I want to, I’m going to have to block off some regular writing time and get more realistic about what my output should look like. I’m a slow writer. If my main goal really is to finish a novel draft by the end of the year, then there’s only so much else that I can do.
Posting Schedule for May
I like Tuesdays, so we’re going to stick with Tuesdays.
May 7: In Which Miss Martin Remarks That Wolves Don’t Eat Each Other . . . and a complete summary of Poets and Chess Players Part One! Part Two is going to be very exciting, and I don’t want anyone to feel you’re required to get through those rambling first twelve chapters before you can appreciate it.
May 14: Fortunate Son (part one), a Metal Gear Solid 3 fanfic. Cold War spies, secret pasts, family tragedies, heavy use of dramatic irony. Major Ocelot suspects that the Cobras know something about his rumored legendary father.
May 21: Fortunate Son (part two). The Fear tells Ocelot an old war story, and the Major sees a ghost.
May 28: Poets Part Two begins posting with #13, In Which Mr. Echevarria and Comrade Seleznyov Inspect A Hydroelectric Plant3.
Closing Announcements
After learning a little more about how the site works, I’ve enabled paid subscriptions so that my posts can be picked up by Substack’s algorithms. Currently, there are no paywalls and no benefits set up—it’s purely there for the discoverability boost. Monthly plans are $5 and annual plans are $15, i.e discounted 50% from the minimum (and if you buy one now, you’ll keep getting 50% off forever. Allegedly. One of you may need to volunteer to test this…)
Someday I would like to earn enough from writing that I can bridge the gap between the maternity coverage I get at my day job and the time I’d actually like to take off. While this is really a very small goal, meeting it would mean a lot. I’m not ready to start marketing myself properly and deal with the overhead of a ‘real business’—this is just a first step. I’ve confirmed that readers are interested in my work, and that I can deliver for you without compromising my other roles in life.
Your time and attention are currency enough, and I appreciate them more than I can say. Thank you. God bless you. Let’s have a good summer together.
Just writing this number down feels like a crime against humanity.
The real lesson here is that while we can go for much longer without doing the laundry than I thought we could, it’s chaotic, and I’ve been totally justified in insisting on Saturday Wash Day.
“I’m writing about international spies who all know several languages.”
“That sounds complicated. There’s one language they all share so they can easily communicate, right?”
“…”
“…So they can easily communicate, right??”
I actually identified this problem years ago and just never bothered to solve it. Proof that lazy worldbuilding will come back to bite you.
I'm so happy that your favorite story of mine was The Scetis Valley! It's not that I consider my other stories were bad, but it took me some guts to walk away from the conventions of contemporary short stories and those of my own writing style, especially when I knew the scoring criteria. Anyways, congratulations once again!
“I’m proud of myself for sharing my written work with my family for the first time.” That’s the real victory, ngl.
But hey congratulations again, EB!