It’s time for the mid-year review!
Things are happening. I have—
Major Book News
My debut novel, Perceiver, is available for pre-order on Amazon!
You can read the first chapter here. I’ll write about the process of writing Perceiver and the trilogy as a whole as the books are released.
In other publishing news, “Singot” was published in Metaphorosis Magazine, and an upcoming short story, “The Hole in the System”, to be published in Hexagon Speculative Magazine September 1st. You can read “Singot” here. I’ll edit this post when “Hole” drops.
“Singot” is about a kindergarten teacher, Stacey, who has a new student in her class: an alien named Poche. Poche is a Sinmai, who can share their thoughts and experiences perfectly through touching palms with another Sinmai, through a process called singot. While a powerful form of communication, singot has its limits. Singot can only be done in person, and the Sinmai must singot frequently and with a large number of Sinmai to stay healthy. They travel to Earth to learn about verbal and written communication from humanity. Stacey must help Poche learn how to communicate, even while she struggles to articulate what it even means to understand another person.
You can read more about what inspired “Singot” here.
“A Hole in the System” is about an opera singer and her fiance who become infected by holes. When things don’t make sense, the singer tries to make her own, even as her world turns into a sieve.
Hours
In my 2020 Year in Review, I mentioned how I would be tracking my hours by project rather than by writing, editing, etc. Here are my results for my most worked-upon projects so far for 2021.
Reading, as usual, is the tallest bar. This will not change, ever.
The next biggest bar is my diary. I have written three pages every day since 2011. Usually it’s three pages of whatever project I’m working on at the time, but during 2020, I switched to writing in my diary. I will sometimes take snippets from my diary to weave into my writing, but about 99% of what goes in doesn’t go out. I wondered whether to include it here as a project, because it isn’t a project, technically. But it helps me straighten my thoughts before I put them in blog posts, stories, or social media, and it helps keep me sane, so I’m including it. I’m trying to shift the three pages back to fiction, but I’d like to keep writing at least a page or two a day to keep it up.
Perceiver 2 (working title) takes up the next largest bar. It’s my big project this year. I will send chapters to my writing group in August, and it is scheduled to go to my editor in December
The fourth largest bar is “Plague of Doppelgangers”… a short story. It’s driving me crazy. It should not take nearly 60 hours to draft and revise a sub-5,000 word short story! Even 20 hours is pushing it. The graph shows “Singot” (around 6,000 words) at 20 hours, but I did the bulk of the work last fall. “Singot” probably took longer. I’ve worked on it for so long, I’m numb to the pleasures of why I started writing it in the first place. I’ve sent it off to writing group to get fresher eyes.
I’m challenging myself to take a 4,000 word short story from draft to done in 10 hours or less. I’m sure some of you will say even 10 hours is too much. Maybe it is. But it’s an improvement over what I have been doing, and it’s reachable, so I’m going to try it.
Review
Six days into the new year, an insurrection. I got vaccinated, returned to working in the office in April, and nearly got scammed out of my life savings. I started a new exercise routine and lost weight. My left eye started twitching. I got two story acceptances and scheduled Perceiver to drop August 31st. My office lost our email and network drives for two weeks because of the Kaseya attack. Now at the tail end of July, the Delta variant of COVID-19 is picking up steam in my neck of the woods.
So what happened in the first six months of 2021?
I’ve been trying to get back to normal, but it feels wrong to pretend that normal is here. More and more, I write to find something to believe in. Mostly I believe in friends and family and the people who try to make the world a better place. And I believe in the three pages, thinking, and reading.
Having “Singot” and a “Hole in the System” snatched up by magazines and seeing good reviews for Perceiver 1 heartens me. There’s a place for my weird little fiction out there. And perhaps as the world wobbles on its axis and heatwaves warp the horizon, weird is the necessary shape of the door that leads to a better future.
Things are happening, and so am I.
E. C. Fuller