I have been using Obsidian as my main writing tool for a couple of years now. I run it on my iPad, my Android phone, and my Windows laptop (that might become a Linux laptop fairly soon, but that’s another post). It works great on all platforms, and it is simple to sync my work from one platform to another. On the extremely rare occasion when I get a version conflict between two of the platforms it is flagged and fairly easy to correct.
Yep. Still writing stories this week. In fact, I was in the middle of writing one when I left to write this post and I really should be getting back to it.
For the next few weeks I will be working on a small handful of stories. And punching up some others to get them ready to submit. And I will be submitting the ones that are already punched up and waiting. And I will be resubmitting the ones that have already been rejected at least once. And I will be looking for new places to submit stories. And I will be working on game art and code for my own game projects. And I will be creating graphics for other game projects.
I hit a strange milestone recently. This is both the most stories I have had out on submission and the longest I have had multiple stories out on submission.
Let’s be completely honest, most, if not all, of them will be rejected. Now that’s not a defeatist attitude, that’s just the way this game goes. Most stories get rejected. Sometimes several times.
For the first time in quite a while, I have several stories out on submission.
If you have never sent stories out or submitted stories to a publisher, just sending the stories out means almost nothing.
I just finished writing and editing another very short story and I am all out of words. The story writing will be slowing down after next week so I will probably be more interested in writing here again. Until then, I hope you have been enjoying these slightly more burnt out posts.
I just finished the latest rounds of revision on a couple of my stories. One, I think, is ready to send out now. The other might need another pass, but it’s getting close. These two are relatively short stories, so they are quicker to work on, but I do have a few longer ones that need some love. For those ones I have to work up some nerve before diving back into them. One thing though. I have been writing short stories for a few years now, so I have a backlog of ones that I haven’t finished polishing or sent out anywhere, and every once in a while I discover one that I had written, but completely forgotten about. While that is a strange feeling, it does mean that I won’t be running out of material to shine up and send out any time soon. That is in addition to the small handful of stories that have been rejected several times and I don’t really know what to do with now. They might end up in some sort of collection sometime, or maybe I will just post them up here if they can’t find some place that will publish them.
It’s a funny thing, when you go back to edit older stories. You notice things that you missed the first few times around.
The terrible parts stand out, of course. Stark and prickly. It’s hard to say why you ever wrote them in the first place. It’s easy to yank them out by the roots to make way for new sentences that fit the flow of the story much better. Well, maybe not easy, but doable.
I recently finished the game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. If you haven’t played the game and are spoiler averse, maybe you should just skip this one. I’m going to use this game as an example, but it might get a little bit spoilery.
I just finished reviewing a whole raft of other peoples stories. you might think that it’s difficult to write a story, but trying to constructively critique other peoples stories is so much more difficult.
I’m working on the last story in a group of stories. A bouquet of stories. Will I ever clean them up and send them off to get published? Who knows. Sometimes I just write to write, ya know. Anyway, I had this story idea worked out, but it wasn’t really crystallized. Like, all the vibes were there, but I didn’t have the details. So, instead of typing in random things, I went to exercise. I have a pretty strong belief in running background processes. When you aren’t actively trying to solve a problem, but are engaged in some other task that is more or less automatic, my brain at least, runs background processes. That’s when I figure out solutions to so many problems. Or, if not solutions, different angles of attack on particular problems. So I went to exercise and, whoosh, a whole wave of concrete ways to solve these story ideas flooded in. I had to stop at one point so that I could type up some point form story structure. Now, I’m back at the keyboard, and other than this short aside, I have been typing in actual prose rather than just mashing away at point form notes. I have a bunch more words to tap into this keyboard, so I think I will go do that. If I don’t it will be very late before I get it all punched in.
I’m still writing short stories. Normally, I am pretty good at writing something based off prompts. It’s like rapid fire word association. I get a prompt, or a couple of prompts, as input, and my brain comes up with several potential stories a few minutes later. They are almost all terrible story ideas, to be sure, but I don’t really get ‘blocked’. I think I have recently experienced the closest I have ever had to being blocked. The last couple of stories that I have worked on have been more difficult than usual, but I think I might know why. I think I might just be less satisfied with my usual ideas. That’s not to say that I think my older stories are bad, but the seed ideas for them, I might pass on those now rather than writing those first few lines. So it’s less of a block and more of a slower ramp up and more searching before landing on an idea that I think might make for a good story. I don’t know if that means that I will be writing better things in the future, or maybe worse things. Maybe this is just normal, maybe it’s a passing phase. In any case, I do have an idea for this current story now, so I better get back to writing it.
I’m writing a new flash story (under 1000 words) but this time I’m working on making it particularly ‘voicey’. I like to adopt a character for a story every now and then. It isn’t exactly easy to do, but it is an interesting challenge.
I have a neat little stack of stories that I am punching up for submission right now. That’s nice and all, but sometimes it can be a bit tricky to take these flash length pieces and rework them in a way that fills them out, without losing that flash length immediacy.
I had been writing a different thing about games for this post, but I thought instead that I would say this.
My story Birds, Vibrant and Wild, published in Kaleidotrope’s winter 2025 issue, received a nice review and recommendation in Locus.
At the end of these story competitions it is customary to write a summary of all of your stories and how you arrived at them.
While I do enjoy reading other writers summaries, I really don’t like writing them myself.
Well, I wrapped up the last story for this short story competition thing. The results aren’t all in, but I did… fine.
A lot of my stories ended up somewhere in the middle of the list, but they got some decent comments. The thing with this competition is, it’s not really a competition at all. Really it’s a good way to get a lot of other writers, some of whom are very good, to look over a first draft of your work and offer a lot of opinions and advice.
If you read these, you’re probably getting as tired of reading about writing as I am about writing about writing. I just finished editing and submitting a story, so I’m low on words at the moment. I think I’ll just leave it at that. Maybe next week I’ll write about a game!
The Global Game Jam was this past weekend. And I didn’t participate. Because I was doing this writing jam. A jam is a jam though. One of the major parts of a jam is that you are given a prompt, or a bunch of prompts and what you make from those prompts will be anyone’s guess. I have done a lot of jams by now and I have a few rules for dealing with prompts. It turns out, for me at least, the rules are the same if I am jamming on a game or jamming on some writing. I’ll drop some of them here.
The writing competition I am in adheres to a very strict, very tight, word count. It’s pretty easy to blow past that limit and have to walk everything back, one word at a time. I managed to wrestle it down. This time. I have found this practice of hitting certain word counts really supercharges my editing. When you are looking for more concise ways to word things, you also find better ways to make an impact. Better ways to get to a certain feeling or vibe. You can’t count on long, flowery, descriptions. You need to get to the heart of what you are trying to say, quickly and efficiently. I have found that this practice had the effect of making me more aggressive when editing, even when I didn’t need to hit a specific limit. My current stories are more compact. I don’t know that this will work for everyone, but just like doing a lot of reps can strengthen your muscles, a lot of editing makes you better at editing. If you are looking to improve your writing, I fully recommend joining a similar competition or jam.
I’m doing another one of those writing contest things. Writing very short stories every weekend for at least a little while.
I’ve only just started, so I don’t really have much to say about it yet.
I would bet that everyone who writes fiction has some basic rules that they follow. Probably, a lot of them are rules learned from courses or instructional books on writing. At least a few of them will be something the writer came up with themselves. Some might even be unconscious or at least unvoiced directives.
Well, I signed up for the weekend story writing competition again. It’s not for a few weeks, so I have time to back out if I want to.
I did consider that, instead of writing new stories for the contest, I would still block out that time for writing, but I would go back to some older stories that need a punch up. Try to finish more of them. Maybe even send them out and try to get them published. That seems like what I should do with these stories, right?
So this is week two of using Obsidian to write these posts.
It’s just a tool, so using Obsidian hasn’t really changed how I write. I have used a lot of different word processors and WYSIWYG text editors. For a hot minute, I used VS Code to write. I have tried writing with a pen and paper and transferring the words to digital later. I really hated that and it doesn’t really align with the way my brain works.
I’m testing out a new way of writing these post. I’m not sure if it will work for me yet, but I’ve been having problems with the way I have been doing it for the last (checks watch) ten years or so.