Hello writers, I hope November is treating you well so far! Are any of you participating in Nanowrimo? I am, although as usual I’m tweaking it to meet my own ends (finishing a work in progress rather than starting a new one from scratch) but Maureen is wrapping up the final semester of class, which doesn’t leave enough time for Nano. But! once she’s done teaching, we have a bunch of new things we want to try here!
First, I wanted to let you all know that we have started experimenting with video! We have a Youtube channel for Story Kitchen Studio where I’ve been posting once a week, on Thursdays. This week, I’ll be talking about Worldbuilding with Fashion and Clothing!
I also converted the post about starting out writing SFF into two videos, Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Writing SFF Part 1 and Part 2. And since I’ve been working a lot on my short story submissions, I decided to produce a video about that as well: SFF Story Submission Secrets. Please check it out if you enjoy videos like this!
I also narrated a short story for the first time, for Podcastle: Hummingbird, by Eisuke Aikawa, translated by Toshiya Kamei. It’s a quirky, sweet story about what home means, about freedom, about being yourself. It was a real challenge to narrate it, actually, and switch fluidly between English and Japanese. I think I’ll write more about that in the future because it was such an interesting experience for me.
Have you caught up on the Story Kitchen podcast episodes? There are nine episodes of deep dives into questions like “What is Technique, Anyway?” and other concerns that nerdy writers like Maureen and me ponder incessantly.
And, I sold a story to Uncanny Magazine for publication in 2022! It’s a story that went through a lot of revisions. I first drafted it, I think, about three years ago. Maybe longer? Then I completely rewrote it a couple of times. A few different writing groups gave me feedback on it over the years, and I also put it away for a while because I didn’t know how to fix it. Well, about six month ago, I pulled it out again and I tried something else to deliver the ending that I knew I wanted–and it worked! Uncanny liked it! I’m so chuffed. It’s called “Boundless” and I’ll update when I know what month it’ll be out.
I hope you are all well and thriving, and happy writing!