I was so excited to see my short story “Simulations” finally appear online in Mythaxis magazine! You can check it out, here: https://mythaxis.co.uk/issue-34/. I love Mythaxis because it’s free, ad-free and beautifully curated and illustrated. I highly recommend all the stories in this issue. All were deliciously disturbing, well-written and thought-provoking.
Now that the short story is out in the world, I only have one more story on submission and only at two places. It’s a weird epistolary piece set in 19th century Russia. I will probably submit it a few more places in the fall, but as it stands, it might be a while until anything else of mine is published.
Yes, I’ve been writing a novel. It’s a completely different ball game than a short story in that it’s hard to even know if or when you’ll ever be done. I’ve been working on versions of this novel for close to five years. I *think* I’ve finally committed to a fully outlined plot, but miles to go before I edit… The fear of course is that I’m putting in all this work and I am not sure whether I’ll ever have something to show for it.
But I’ve committed to a slog. Whether it’s five minutes of editing or 3000 new words on the page, I am working on this thing every day, a little bit at a time. If the short story is a 10k, this is like training for an ultra-marathon you aren’t quite sure you’ll ever run. But you just put one foot in front of the other because you enjoy the process, even when you don’t.
I’ve also gotten some great advice, fit for a short story writer, to split the novel up into parts and to work on the parts separately. One of the hardest things for me is staying organized and not getting lost in my own writing, especially when I keep changing the chronological structure from linear to circular to reverse chronology. I’ve tried Scrivner, but it felt like it would be extra work to learn it and use it. So now I just have these three documents that contain three planes of time, which will eventually be braided together. And I slog and I slog and I slog. One word after the other.
Masha Kisel 