So it’s barely been a month since Viable Paradise and apparently my beast doesn’t want to waste time revamping the novel. Or maybe it’s my editor. I can’t tell. Regardless, the "me" inside of me wants "Submission Ready Material NOW, please."
And the "please" part of that statement is just an after thought.
So I revamped an earlier published work, "The Monster of Mogahnee Bay," for first time submission to an electronic market. Got that sent off last week. Today I just finished third or fourth re-write one of my VP assignments and sent it off to another electronic market, Flash Fiction Online.
For those without Tribal Knowledge who may go forward into the wilderness journey called "the Workshop Experience," I won’t spoil the fun by speaking of details. Suffice to say, it was one of my scenes.
For those with Tribal Knowledge, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Of course, if the bugger gets published, you might actually be able to guess the assignment details. One specific reference is rather blatant. The other references are subtly buried in the work. I hope.
So, two submissions in four weeks. Not bad. But they’d both been written by the time VP was done, so I’m not sure if it’s cheating. My beast wants more. It wants to ram out submissions by the bucketful. I’m not sure if my inner editor can handle the stress of it though. I’ve got three unpublished short stories that I wrote before VP. I’m debating whether or not I should polish those again. Or if I should concentrate on my novel.
Decisions, decisions.
In the meantime, what do y’all think of happy endings?
I’ve written stories where the protagonist wins and all is well with the world, or where she wins and not all is quite well with the world. But I’ve also written stories about the un-winnable fight (is un-winnable even a word?). Stories where the world is the world and the protagonist is screwed no matter what she does.
So this is my question for any blog readers who may care to comment. Would you read a good story even if there was no way for the protagonist to save the day? Thoughts and details appreciated.
3 Responses
Go Brandie go! Get those shy stories out there.
It’s frustrating for a reader (of sff) to read a story where there’s no kind of win. But win isn’t limited to ‘saving the day/world/universe”. The world can be lost, but if the protag has managed some kind of smaller win, or just an internal win as opposed to external loss, this could count for me as a happy ( enough) ending…
Re happy endings
I’ve heard the idea batted around that the difference between genre fiction and the literary genre is that literature frequently comes with a sad or ambiguous ending. What do you think of that?
Ambiguous endings strike me as poor writing more than they do a literary genre thing. Of course, there’s ambiguous as in “the story doesn’t seem to end, it just cuts off” and there’s the Total Recall “Are we or aren’t we in VR still.” Of the two, I much prefer when ambiguous is very clearly and deliberately delineated. I’ve read too many stories where they just ramble to a close and that really bothers me.
I like the idea, though, that happy or sad doesn’t matter so long as it’s the right ending. I guess the question is, though, what do modern readers expect a “right ending” to be. It certainly seems to be something different than what other writers (and editors and agents) think a “right ending” is. After all, we are far more critical of our art than the average jane.
Jane usually just wants a good read. We writers think we must make Statements.