So I used part of my spring break to get a lot of writing done. I’ve been working on some flash fiction recently, which is a genre I’ve never really dabbled in, and of course, the trusty old LHC story. I’ve been revising the hell out of the piece and I’ve also run it by some other writer friends from the MFA program and have been incorporating their suggestions. My goal is to get it down to about 19 pages which is a respectable length and then send it out to some magazines at the beginning of the summer or start of the fall. Most journals don’t read over the summer months, but a few hold pay to enter contests that cover subscription costs. Although, to be honest, usually it’s always established writers who end up winning those, and the editor of Tin House–a mag I’ll definitely be submitting the Collider piece to–told a bunch of us at Pitt that emerging writers are better off just vying for out and out publications instead of contest victories.
One interesting development I stumbled across over break was the second story in a cycle I’m beginning to work on concerning the Collider. While the first piece focuses on a female scientist, the second one is in the third person and follows a janitor who begins to see a lot of familiar faces from his surface life down in the underground research compound. I knocked out a draft in about a week and started planning out some of the other stories. It’s interesting because my manuscript’s going to be due at the end of ’09 for the MFA program, and for awhile I’ve figured I’d submit a novel I’ve been writing and revising for about…. 11 months now titled Burn All Your Cities. But now that graduation is a bit closer, I am considering using this summer to write a ton of Collider stories and submitting a story cycle ala Winesburg, Ohio, The Things They Carried, Circus in Winter, etc. etc.
One final note: in my Digital Theory class we discussed apes that were raised by robot mothers who ended up autistic, schizophrenic and impotent. I’m not sure if I located the exact article but I did manage to track down this, which was incredibly helpful during the second Collider piece, tentatively titled “This Neighborhood’s Getting Worse Every Day.” Because if you’re working on a collection of stories set in a scientific research compound, you have to work in impotent apes raised by robots if you can.
