Writing brain turned on

[hrj]

I've been muttering to myself for the last year that I wanted to get back to writing fiction regularly (and also to playing music regularly) but my environment has been too disordered to make it feasible. Then I learned that there's going to be another Sword and Sorceress anthology and I turned on my backbrain to start stirring up possible continuing "skin singer" plots. Well, something must be working, because my brain has been feeling very creative ... on an entirely different set of set-aside stories that wouldn't really work for S&S. Yes, cat-vacuuming strikes again! But, hey: at least the juices are flowing again.

(The stories that have taken over my brain come from a thread I think of jokingly as "the Mabinogi for lesbians" or "why yes, I've read entirely too much medieval Welsh literature lately, why do you ask?" A fun little romance number using themes and motifs from MW lit., although trying to avoid the archaic language trap. I actually sold the first story in the set to Jinx Beers for Lesbian Short Fiction ... right before it folded. By that time I had a second story halfway written but got stuck on a plot twist and set it aside.)

I'd love to do something for the skin-singers series that's a bit more on the comic side, but I'm not sure I can write comic. And, of course, there's no guarantee that anything I submit will get bought ....

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

*grin* Well I suspect you're probably smack dab in the middle of my target demographic. The problem I've found is finding a publisher who believes the demographic exists (and wants to try to aim for it). Back when I was sending my Romano-British bodice ... uh ... tunic-ripper around to all the standard lesbian publishers, the biggest sense I got back was that they simply didn't know what to do with a historical. (This was supported by my observation of what was getting published in the way of historicals.) And when you did find sf, fantasy, or historicals put out by the standard lesbian publishers, a lot of if was just really really bad. (And I mean bad spelling and bad grammar bad, not just bad characters and bad plot bad.) I suspect that they didn't have the background to evalute submissions in those fields and then interpreted negative feedback as being aimed at the genres rather than at the specific executions. (This is all wild guesswork on my part. And quite possibly 50% sour grapes.)