Barbara V Evers

Image courtesy of FreeImages.com/Stockers9 Every now and then, I read through my unpublished short stories. This can be a frustrating or sad exercise, especially if the stories are good. If they're not good, I can cringe or laugh and then revise them. It's the Good Stories that Bug Me Yes, that sounds odd, but it's hard to live with a good story remaining unpublished. I have a few stories, some of my best ones, that fit this situation. Why? They're too long. Most short story journals and contests set word count limits at 2500-3000 words. My unpublished ones  fall between the 3000-7000 word mark. I've tried cutting them down, that's how I got one of them under  5000 words, but cut any shorter, they won't work. Two have done well in the Faulkner-Wisdom contest--one of the few contests open to all fiction genres with higher word maximums and few content restrictions. Faulkner-Wisdom is one of the largest contests in the country, so to make it through...

Image courtesy of Pixabay.com No, I didn't lose my manuscript files. I'm too cautious these days for that. I lost my To Do list. Actually, I lost the notebook that I write my To Do list in. I've searched EVERYWHERE to no avail. I actually stopped writing at this point and checked one more spot. Nope. Although I did find some trash to throw out. I know the notebook is out there somewhere. I'll probably find it when I'm not looking for it, but for the life of me, I can't figure out where I put it. This is what comes from using the holidays to move and reorganize my office.  Yes, I've been looking for the notebook that long! It's probably with my WIP (work in progress) folder. That's missing, too. The loss of a notebook wouldn't be a big issue except that it contains the notes for a project I'm supposed to start next week.  Plus, I like to refer back to my To Do list to see when I did something. We've all lost something in...

Have you gotten back on track since the holidays? As of yesterday, I'm headed that way. Weird to be halfway through the month of January before I got my rhythm going, but it couldn't be helped with the later date for school to start back this year. Even then, I ended up with a sick child on the first day back. Although I haven't been writing as much as I'd like, I have been reading posts about writing. A blog I follow,   Mythic Scribes , runs a series of primers on topics important to world building. Not a Fantasy or Science Fiction writer?  No problem, most of these posts apply to other genres, also. I thought I'd share a few of them here: How To Choose Sounds For a Fantasy Language A Primer on Cults for Writers Law for Fantasy Writers--Legal Systems in Worldbuilding A Primer on Organized Crime for Writers Creating a Fictional Religion History for Fantasy Writers:  Millers History for Fantasy Writers:  How to Cross a River History for Fantasy Writers:...