First an update on me and my writing. Some readers may remember that I attended a Workshop run by Lisa L. Hannett, at the South Australian Writers centre. It was a a good decision for a number of reasons:
- Lisa is good at what she does
- Fear of social failure ie not having something to show the workshop, really works for me
- It introduced me to a couple of folks with who I clicked
- I may have a writing group (if they’ll have me)
- I have a finished and increasingly polished story that I will send out to be joyfully rejected by the Short Fiction market
So a post apocalyptic/realist horror (groan) tale tentatively called Of Sorrow and Loss may be on its way to a paying outlet near you (on its way and likely coming back, but hey, rejections are par for the course).
So remembering the wise words of a fave short fiction author of mine, Peter M Ball, who incidentally wrote a piece for Lisa Hannett’s blog called Know Your Rights. I am setting out with best intentions, to treat this writing in a business like fashion. To manage my submissions formally with a database tracking submissions and noting down what rights I have sold. I may have to write 15-20 stories before one gets published but it’s the mind-set that counts.
So to help with that process I looked up a nifty piece of software created by Simon Haynes, author of the Hal Spacejock sci-fi comedy series and professional programmer.
It’s called Sonar3 (get it navies use sonar to track subs, authors send out submissions, ah forgeddit). It’s free and fairly intuitive to use. It was written specifically for the Speculative Fiction Short Story market but it has some application beyond that (tracking non-fiction articles etc).
Go here and check it out.
If you’re in the novel writing business it’s also worth checking out yWriter5 another free bit of software that provides much the same sort of facility as Scriviner. With less time required to upskill oneself and costing nothing.
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