Mormon Lit Blitz Semifinalist

A month or two ago, I went into a rather unusual productivity spike for me. The deadline for submitting to the Mormon Lit Blitz was approaching, and I really wanted to submit. Most years, I struggle to come up with even one idea for this competition, even though I love it—and even if I do get an idea, I struggle (more than just the usual) with how to put it into words. This year, I had about six ideas, and I found myself actually pulling some of them together and getting them into words.

The results: One story that started out as a tale of midwives and took a slight turn, requiring a lot of editing and revision to bring it a place that (to be honest) I’m still not entirely happy with. One story that popped into my head, almost fully formed based on a prompt from an episode of Writing Excuses. One poem. You read that right—a poem.

Pieces for the Lit Blitz are always excruciatingly difficult for me to have beta readers for. As I mention in this previous post, I can’t even let my husband read them—and he beta reads everything for me and is an incredible help. But somehow it’s too weird.

To make a long story short: I submitted all three pieces (three are allowed), and two of them were selected as semifinalists (interestingly, the two that I thought were weaker, but sometimes you just don’t know what’s going to work). However, when the finalist list came out, both were dropped. This honestly doesn’t surprise me. I pretty much expected it; they’re just not as good as I would have liked them to be (though they are the best I could make them for now). So while it was a bit sad, like I said, not surprising.

And then came the next tricky bit. Would I share them now? The nature of the Lit Blitz is such that my writing for it really won’t fit in any other market. There’s no point in keeping them locked up because they’re never going to sell anywhere else. It’s Lit Blitz or Bust! But if I couldn’t share them with my husband, how could I do it here? Well, to make another long story short, I’m just gonna do it. I’m going to post one now (for reasons you’ll see when you read it), and then I’ll take a break because the actual finalists for the Mormon Lit Blitz are going up, and I want to just pay attention to them. Then I’ll post the others later, provided I still have the courage.

Regardless of my pieces, though, I hope that some of you will take the time to read the finalists when they come out. So many of the stories are wonderful every year, and though many speak specifically to an LDS audience, a lot of them also transcend that border and speak to human experience in general.

Podcastle Semifinalist, NYC Midnight Flash Fiction

Fun news! A story I submitted to Podcastle’s flash fiction contest (500 words or less) is now a semifinalist! The competition has gone from about 215 stories down to 51.

I finished a decent draft of this piece in March-ish at ~900 words, but it needed some tightening. So the challenge to drop down to 500 was the perfect boost to get cutting. The competition is strictly anonymous, so I won’t talk more about the piece itself, but I may post later, after names have been revealed.

If you are a SFF reader who loves very short fic, you’re welcome to read and participate in the voting. The forum where they hold the contest is currently down, unfortunately. They had some tech bugs at a very good-and-bad time. Good because they’d just finished up the first round of voting. Bad because those of us in the semifinals are now holding our breath. All my sympathies to their “tech barbarians” for having to get this sorted. When the forum is up again, I’ll share a link to show you how you can get involved.

As I mentioned, the competition is very anonymous, so please, if you are among the few who know which piece is mine, don’t vote in my semifinalist group! And obviously don’t say, “Oh, hey! This is Jeanna’s story!” Or do anything else nefarious, like creating multiple accounts at a single household, etc.—I really don’t want to succeed by cheating. (And I am up against some really fantastic stories, as well as a few I don’t particularly care for—but there are enough wonderful ones that it’s going to be hard.)

In other news, I’ll be doing NYC Midnight’s flash fiction contest again this year. It’s going to be weird doing it from an Australia time zone rather than New York’s. I’ll write for half a day on Saturday, take a break for Sunday, and finish my piece on Monday morning, so that’s a bit different.

In honor of preparing for this contest, and to dust off my rusty writing skills, I’m requesting some prompts! So if you’re still reading this post, I’d love to have you comment with the following: a genre, a location, and an object. Be as random as you want. Then I’ll pick a couple of these and write some flash fiction! If I choose your prompts, I’ll also send you my story to read (it may be great or it may be trash—it’s like a grab bag from the dollar store, where you have no idea what you’re going to get!).

That’s it for now! Thanks for reading.

"Forty Years" Wins, and Some Serious Backstory

It's been a couple weeks now, but I knew I needed to update you all on the outcome of the Mormon Lit Blitz this year. It was such a surreal experience for me, skimming through the post that shared the winners. Fourth place ... not me. Third, then second ... not me. I almost missed first place entirely, and then I saw my name. That was me!


It was such a thrill! And yet, I feel like there is more to the story that I should share.

I had been sitting on this story for years. I knew in my mind how it was supposed to feel, how it was supposed to end, but the several times I'd tried to put the structure together with the actual story were flat failures. So I'd set it aside again until it niggled at me and I picked it up.

Finally, one night, in one of those miraculous bursts of clarity that sometimes come, the words came out. I don't use the word "miraculous" lightly here. For me it was exactly that. I had prayed that if I was ever to write this story, I needed some help. There's a weird, fine line when it comes to talking about "inspiration" in writing, and I don't know where exactly that line is sometimes. I certainly don't want to blame God for having written this tale, but I will honestly say that the clarity of that brief time spent at the computer was a gift.

I still had to edit and polish the words now, but I had them on the screen. It was such a relief. I worked furiously and eventually had it where I wanted it to be (or at least as much as I could bring it to--I've already discovered things I would rewrite if I could, but such is life).

As I sat and stared at it on my screen, I realized I could not bring myself to let even my husband read it. I always let him read my stuff, even the horrible junk, but I just couldn't. It terrified me. It was somehow far more personal than a lot of the actually autobiographical pieces I had written.

To address a question that arose when I accidentally called it "loosely autobiographical," here are some of the actual facts:

It's more like "inspired by true events." Which is to say that a couple of the specific moments discussed in the story did actually happen to me, I did have a complicated relationship with my mom (who died four months before I married, not a year), and I have felt many of the sentiments involved. I did once overhear someone say that Mom had too many kids and it threw her hormones out of whack (as the seventh child of seven, I took that to mean it was my fault that she was a little broken). I do have fond, sweet, cherished memories of Mom helping me study for a spelling bee, as well as memories of her teaching me every craft under the sun and being a woman who loved to create beauty. I called my brother, whom she was living with at that point, the morning that she died--but I didn't think to talk to her.

 

And I do have moments where I worry that I am somehow irreparably broken, that I will pass on too much of my mother's soul's DNA.

 

On the other hand, my oldest child is only nine. There is time for us both to grow up, and I hope that when the day comes, I have a snappier, peppier sort of a pep talk. Also, Mom didn't miss my graduation or other important events. She was there. She was both, in some ways, a better mom and a worse mom than the one I imagined in "Forty Years."

 

That's fiction--it takes the real and bends it. The mother in my story is not at all my mother, even though in some ways she is. So for some inexplicable reason, the blend of fiction and autobiography was too tender--like prodding at a wound--for me to show my husband, Brice. 

And yet I submitted it to the contest. Because life is weird that way, and sometimes it's easier to share with complete strangers than with those closest to you. Plus, I didn't really think it would make it.

Then when it became a finalist, I was so excited! Until I realized that people I knew would be reading it. Worst of all, my siblings and my husband would read it! (It didn't occur to me until much later that actually the very worst of all would be that my nine-year-old would want to read it, as she wants to read everything.)

Still, I overcame that fear, and I advertised it among family and friends, and I tried not to think about how it would feel to have them read it, and I tried to pretend it was totally fine. I even encouraged them to vote--virtuously (and honestly!) asking them to vote how they really felt, even if it wasn't for me.

Which brings us to the moment that I discovered I took first place. Hooray! Callooh callay even! And then, with a sinking feeling, what if I didn't really deserve to win? What if I just got so many people to vote for me that I tipped the scales? I spent the rest of the morning feeling sick, wanting to celebrate but thinking I shouldn't. Because I probably didn't really earn it fair and square.

 

 And the thing is, I'll never know. No matter how many of my friends and family come out of the woodwork and tell me it was great, yada yada, I'll just never know. And even if I did know for sure, it wouldn't change that feeling. That's part of the story. It can't be changed by external adulation (which is still fun and nice, of course). It can only be changed on the inside. 

 

And there, I think, I will fall back to "Forty Years." I do think that sometimes we are just wandering in the wilderness, trying to figure things out, but I hope that idea is not bleak. The wilderness can be pretty gorgeous and amazing and full of wonder. But it's not the destination.

In the meantime, I'll keep writing and hopefully getting better and hopefully even occasionally feeling like I wrote something pretty wonderful. 

 

Plus, I'll spend my prize money on books. Which always helps.

"Forty Years" on the Mormon Lit Blitz

So, today’s the day that my story is posted on the Mormon Lit Blitz. You can read the story here, and if you would like to participate in a discussion about it, go here. While the contest is obviously Mormon, I think many of the pieces (including mine) speak to an audience beyond Mormons (although some do not translate out very well). So if you like flash fiction, you might give these a try anyway.

I’ve loved reading the pieces this year. As always, not every story speaks to me, but so many of them do that it’s always worth reading and thinking. Plus, they’re really short, so what have you got to lose?

Voting will take place next week, June 12–14, and if you’re so inclined, it would be lovely of you to go read and vote. I don’t even care (mostly) if you don’t vote for me, just as long as you vote for what you loved the most.

In case you’re wondering, my favorites were (in chronological order):

“Celestial Accounting” by Katherine Cowley. I just loved this idea so much. Important truth contained in a funny story.

“Sonata in Three Movements” by Jeanine Bee. Beautiful imagery, sweet and musical. Intergenerational too, like mine.

“There Wrestled a Man in Parowan” by Wm Morris. Ha! A funny piece that made me smile.

“Daughters of Ishmael” by Annaliese Lemmon. This one definitely doesn’t translate out of Mormondom at all, but I loved imagining these sisters and their family ties.

 (Of course) “Forty Years” by me. It’s only very vaguely, very semi-semi-autobiographical, in case you were wondering. (Especially since, you know, I’m only thirty-six and don’t have any grown children.)

What were your favorites? (Better yet, don’t answer me here, but go and discuss them on the blog posts about them. You can get there through the second link above. Writers love to hear that something they wrote made you think or that you connected with it in some way.)

The Promise of Snow, the short version

Hey, so a while ago there was a contest through ANWA (American Night Writers Association) for short pieces based on the theme “Warm the Winter.” I immediately thought that my story “The Promise of Snow” would fit well, but it was just a teensy weensy bit too long (i.e., it was 5500 words for a contest that only allowed up to 1500 words). So I put it through about a thousand revisions, and when it was done, I barely managed to get under the word limit.

But the exciting part is yet to come. I won the fiction category of the contest! Yay!

So, if you wanted to see how the story got drastically slimmed down, here’s the link. Enjoy!

Editing, Reading, Writing, All That Jazz

I’ve been reading/skimming a lot of novels lately. Frankly I’ve always been an obsessive reader (as in, who needs sleep, food, showers, or fresh air when you have books?).* But lately I’ve been doing a lot more analyzing—something I rarely did in the past. (Which lack is not an impressive quality in an author-to-be. Which is not even remotely the point of this blog post.)

The point is that I’ve started noticing some things about a large number of these books—many of which have been self-published. Let me first say that I think self-publishing is wonderful in so many ways. This is by no means a disparagement of self-publishing. However, I have noticed that many of these particular books that I’ve been reading bear a few unfortunate commonalities.

The biggest of these is problems with story elements that simply don’t make sense, that never get explained clearly—things that are obviously a big deal to the characters but that I just don’t understand. For example, I recently read a novel in which the main character is cursed (in rhyming couplet and all). But the curse is so confusing that I never actually understood the peril, even after the character theoretically figured it out. In another novel, I couldn’t understand what the main character thought he was saving the world from.

Here’s what I think happened: It all made sense in the author’s head. It was perfectly clear. But somewhere between the brain and the keyboard, some of it just got lost, or muddled, or twisted around until it no longer made sense for a reader.

Now, I am a copyeditor. If you haven’t heard me mention that yet, here you go: I copyedit. I pick up the tiny details that no sane people care about (like smart quotes vs. straight quotes—oh how it burns me). This is useful stuff for an author. It means my manuscripts (once I have actually worked on them sufficiently) are quite clean overall. Of course I miss things; I’m human. But grammatically and punctuationally,** my work tends to be in good shape.***

So, onto my point.

Being a copyeditor isn’t good enough to make a good manuscript. It requires someone else to look at your book—someone else who hasn’t been swimming through it for the past many moons, someone who knows only what is there on the page. This is something every writer needs. This is why agents and editors exist (well, among other stuff). This is what self-published authors must get as well.

 

Last week I heard about this giveaway at Portable Magic Editing. What a great way to get started. Sign up, ye authors! Sign up! (Or maybe don’t, because that decreases my chances of winning.)

We authors need someone to tell us when we’re writing nonsense. Someone other than our angry readers.

* I both love and fear that I gave this obsession to my older daughter. Oh the pride that shines in my eyes when I see her walking in from the car, to the dinner table, and off to her bedroom carrying a book and reading as she walks. I remember those days so well (probably because they were just yesterday). Sadly, she has not yet developed the talent of looking where she’s going at the same time.

** Do you love how I’ve just told you I’m great with words and now I proceed to make them up?

*** Now I’m going to be severely embarrassed when it turns out I made some particularly dumb mistake in this post. Oh well.

Conference Coming

A while back I learned about the LDStorymakers conference, and my first thought was, “I wish I still lived in Utah.” Then my second thought was, “I could always fly back.” Followed by, “That’s completely crazy and way too expensive.” A whole series of other boring thoughts came next, including fantasies in which my fantastic, brilliant perfection was discovered to wild critical acclaim and incredible riches. And there was probably at least one thought about pizza or Steak-Out. (Tragedy! No more Steak-Out franchise in Provo!)

The series of conflicting and extraneous thoughts continued for weeks on end, until I finally reached a decision (with the help and support of the most amazing husband ever). I’m going to this conference. Yes, I am flying out, spending exorbitant amounts of cash for a hobby (the hobby I love, the hobby that helps keep me somewhat sane, but so far a hobby nonetheless), and soaking up the atmosphere and awesomeness of it all. I’m going to learn a ton, hear from some wonderful people, and get some great feedback on my work. Who knows? Maybe I’ll still get the wild critical acclaim as well. Wink wink.

All of this leads me up to tonight’s real topic: the conference itself and the “Show Your Love” contest.

First of all, the conference is for people who want to/like to write, and it isn’t free. But if you’re in Utah and serious about writing (and also probably Mormon), you might want to consider it.* Second, even if you don’t want to write, Anne Perry will be the keynote speaker on Friday evening, 10 May, and you could come see her for only $15. Should be fun times.

In the meantime, since I’m going, I thought I might as well go all out and try to rub elbows with as many bigwigs as I could manage in one weekend. So I’m entering the “Show Your Love” contest (by writing this blog post! amazing!). And wouldn’t it be just shiny if I got to sit at a table with the VIPs and they thought I was just fabulous and decided to publish my novels sight unseen—to wild critical acclaim, of course? (We really just can’t forget all this wild critical acclaim business, you know.) So let’s all cross our fingers for me.

I should mention that before I was notified of this contest, I was going to happily avoid telling pretty much anyone that I was doing this. Sure, the hubby had to know. My sister had to know (if I’m staying at her apartment for the conference, I kind of have to tell her). A best friend had to know. Another person or two. But generally I was going to pretend that it wasn’t happening so that no one would be the wiser when I felt silly or weird about it.

This was not to be.

Now I’m just going to have to happily declare that I am indeed flying out for this conference. My writing matters to me, more than I can explain. This is an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up, and one that my husband wouldn’t have let me pass up.

So, blah blah blah, etc., etc. I’m flying out for a weekend in May. I’ll update you when it’s all over.

*It’s not restricted to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), but we are certainly the target audience for the conference.

Feeling Shiny

Adding my name and book title would require
a level of technical savvy I do not possess.

Item #1: I won the NaNoWriMo challenge! With a whopping 50,006 words during the month of November. Hoorah! In case you’re wondering, the novel I worked on is different from last year’s and different from Eye of the Beholder (the “Beauty and the Beast” project you probably hear about ad nauseum if you ever ask about how my writing is going). In the past I always wondered how you could turn a fairy tale retelling into a series. You retell the fairy tale once. Done. But I wonder no longer. In trying to decide what to write this year, it just sort of happened: This year’s project, currently titled The Price of Sight or maybe The Price of Looking (but most likely eventually titled something completely different), is a sequel to Eye of the Beholder. Sort of, anyway. It’s set about twenty years after Eye, and it’s about Isabel and the Beast’s daughter, Min. It’s not a fairy tale retelling, just a young adult fantasy novel with a little adventure, a little murder, a little dancing, a little romance, and a lot of magic. And no, it’s not finished. And no, you can’t read it yet. Seriously, people. When I tell you something is a rough draft, it’s really really (really) rough.

Item #2: I took second place in a little Mormon Mommy Writers competition. And okay, yes, the prize is $5. But it also includes publication (even if the publication is tiny). Essentially it’s just fun to have someone outside my family and friends say, “Hey, I think this girl’s submission is shiny.” Although they probably didn’t say “shiny.” But that’s okay, because I’m feeling shiny! In case you’re wondering what I wrote, it was mostly this blog post, with a little less snottiness. Thanks to my fabulous brother Makani for liking the post enough to make me wonder if it might appeal to others!

Item #3: Creative deadline #347 is long-since passed. I intended to have several drafts of Eye complete this year. Ha! What a joke. Onto #378, which is this: My writing buddy Meghan and I both intend to have a finished first draft of our novels finished by the end of February. Stay tuned for the moment when I watch that deadline zoom by too.

…

And now I’m wondering. All those people I challenged to a NaNoWriMo adventure, it’s time to report! (Oh, and sorry I didn’t cheer you on better. Sigh. But I do think you’re awesome.) Did you accomplish your goal? Only some of it? A tiny, tiny speck of it? Good work, now go do some more!