Writing and literary magazines

I write, a little bit of everything: poetry, a novel (in progress), short shorts, a blog (obviously), lists of all kinds, notes to myself, a lot of things I never finish, and I journal, but I think that was all fairly common knowledge. The problem is, I don't know what to do with anything after it's done. There are like a million literary magazines and I have no idea which ones are right for me. Online or print? Artsy or edu-ish? The problem is: I know what I like to read, and I like to read what I write, but is what I write like what I like to read? Sometime consider the fact that a lot of popular authors are published and become famous posthumously, that could be me, but then I shouldn't hold back so much when I write. Get it all out there, ya know? But I really want people to know me when I'm alive, like my writing, want to read it, can't wait for more. That brings me back to the problem I started with: where to submit?

3/4 the way done with a rough draft

At 42,400ish words, I am three fourths of the way done with draft 1 of my novel. It's about 155 typed pages. I have written it completely out of order; beginning with the middle, then end, next I wrote the beginning, and now I need the second half of the middle. Confusing? I hope not once it's all together. The next part is sure to be the most challenging because it is set in a place I have never been. Yikes! I began researching it the day before yesterday, and have already made some slight modifications to the location. The hard thing about setting a story in a real location is that the skeletal information needs to be accurate. With that said, my characters need to live in a house in a neighborhood that suits them. They need to act like transplants and then eventually come to know the restaurant that is all hype and go where the real good food is. I know that happened when we moved to the SAV area, we started out going to the places that got all the attention, but now have local favorites that tourists rarely know about. I have requested info from the visitors bureau of that city and look forward to my information. I do plan on making a trip there, but not until I know what I don't know that I need to know more clearly.

Chugging along

I'm happy to report that I have over 39,000 words written at this point. I have written about 2000 in the past two days. I need more days like this. I really want a rough draft done by the end of the year. It's all fitting together nicely and the only major road blocks I have are feeling what my characters are going through and not writing because I don't want to deal with bad things for them. I wonder if this is a common writer thing? Maybe some day I will know.

I found a genius way of studying vocabulary for the GRE. I have been helping out a friend bringing and picking her kid up from pre-school. This is a brave new world of mini-vans, suv's, mother's, and a plethora of children that I so don't fit in to. However, they do a pick up line that takes forever and a day to get through. In fact, getting in line ten minutes early only ensures that I will be at least fifteen cars back. So, I got smart last Thursday and brought my flashcards with me. I had nothing else to do during that time, so it was a HUGE success. I may just leave the flashcards in the car for good. Pre-school pick up = four days a week and if they're in there, traffic jams, accidents, red lights could all help me get in studying in otherwise wasted time when I would be rocking out to the radio (which is probably embarrassing, yet I so don't care).

In other news I thought of a genius way to put together a lot of my short stories into a book while I was about to take a nap earlier today. The main theme will be examining truth through a characters eyes, because as we all know in every story there is more than one truth depending on whose eyes the story is told through. The terrorist sees what they are doing as a noble act, the victim sees it as (dare I say) terrifying. While everyone won't agree with either perspective, it's the truth to someone.

Last thing of note pertaining to writing: I have officially set out on my quest to decide what my "critical" paper for getting into graduate school will be about. There are suggestions that candidates often revise papers that were written as an undergrad for this task. I have printed out three of the more likely choices to mull over. They are all hugely different, and they seem like I wrote them forever ago. (It was about four years ago, yikes!) So that will be fun . . .