Finding the right market for a story can be tough sometimes (yeah, duh). Right now I’m trying to find a home for a piece that doesn’t seem speculative enough for spec markets, but I’m not sure if it’s “normal” enough for mainstream/literary markets (I’m talking about my cupcake story for those of who who’ve critted it). On top of that, it could probably be classified as romance, but none of the romance markets I looked at seemed remotely appropriate. So the story’s sitting here on my hard drive, all dressed up with nowhere to go. Perhaps I should just shoot it off to the least inappropriate market on my list and see what happens.

Anyone else out there have a story that you can’t seem to find a market for?

I’ve had a hard time sitting down and concentrating on any one writing project this week. I don’t know if it’s because I have a very blah week at work or if I was just distracted by general things, but I felt very scattered this week. I forced myself to sit down a few times this week at various coffee shops and write. I did finish revising a few stories, and I even submitted one (I’m still trying to find an appropriate market for the other). Then, today I worked on my NaNo zombie novel that I haven’t touched in months. Weird. I’ve also been working my way through Max Brooks’ World War Z (thanks, James!) and listening to lots of short fiction podcasts (mostly The Drabble Cast. It’s perfect if you have a short attention span like I do).

I think my main problem this week was that I didn’t have any major stories-in-progress to pick at, just lots of revision work. Hopefully I’ll be more focused this week. Maybe I’ll even make some decent headway on zombie novel (*crosses fingers*).

Oh, and Wednesday I have a flash piece appearing in The Cynic. I’ll post a link when it’s up. In the meantime, you should check out Erin Kinch’s “Alpha” over at Electric Spec!

Got a new-to-me MacBook this weekend. My iBook, trusty as it is, is getting a bit old and slow, and the opportunity to purchase a gently used MacBook came up so I jumped on it. I went from having a 30 GB hard drive to 120 GB. OMG! What on earth will I do with all that real estate? Now that I can actually use Garage Band without it crashing five minutes it, maybe I can put some songs together? Or once I get Photoshop, I can start scanning pictures and designing buttons for my long neglected Etsy shop. To think just four years ago I was using an iBook with a 10 gig hard drive. Scary times . . .

I have several works-in-progress right now, many are close to being submittable, others still need a good deal of work. The SED contest definitely beefed up my backlog of potential stories. The trick is taking these rough drafts and half-baked ideas and making them into marketable stories. Isn’t that always the hard part . . .

Speaking of half-baked ideas, I’ve finally got a sci-fi story I’ve been chipping away at since February to the point where I don’t feel too ashamed to submit it. I’ll just tell you it about a guy who inherits his uncle’s ranch and gets way more than he bargained for. Many, many thanks to my writer’s group for all the helpful feedback on this one. All I have to do now is find some appropriate markets and wait for the rejection letters to roll in.

Finished my tenth SED yesterday! It was a pretty mediocre one, to be honest. I think of the ten stories I’ve written so far, I have three I’ll definitely expand and do something with and about three or four I might polish up and keep as flash pieces, and about three that are complete drivel.

Yesterday I also spent forty minutes on the phone with Charter trying to figure out why my internet wasn’t working. The ready light on my modem hasn’t come on since Sunday. You’d think not having internet access I’d get a lot done. No. I spend a good chunk of my time trying to get that damn modem to work. After having me restart my computer and unplug the modem a few dozen times (something I’d done several times before I even called), the Charter support technician decided someone would have to come out and see what the problem is. Fun! Two more days without internet access. And the really fun part is, since I live in an 80-year-old apartment building, the cables they have to access are tucked away in the attic somewhere, and that always bewilders the cable guy. My landlord always has to help them figure it out. So yay! :-\

Got yesterday’s SED in just an hour or so under the wire. I like the idea of this one, but I was super rushed since I threw The Boyfriend a birthday party, so the execution’s a bit lame. I may go back and rework it, or I may just let it sit on my hard drive for the rest of eternity. Here are the first couple of paragraphs:

When I was a kid, I’d always wanted to be a game show host when I grew up. I consumed a steady diet of vintage games shows growing up, like The Match Game, The Price Is Right, Supermarket Sweep, The Gong Show, Family Feud, and The Dating Game. That’s how my cat Lily and I spent most of our summer afternoons. I figured I’d be like one of those pastel-suited hosts from the ‘70s, with the skinny silver microphone and teeth so white and straight they were probably fake.

When I was 25, my time finally came. I got a chance to host of public access quiz show called Bubble Smack. Not only did they let me wear a pink polyester tuxedo with black velvet trim, they insisted on it. On the nights leading up to the show’s premiere, I’d lay in bed and fantasize about seeing my name—Don Davenport—on the TV screen.

The premise of the show was simple: the contestants answer questions, most of which are about pretty gross stuff like famous murderers, diseases, internal organs, and a good number of odd things I don’t know much about, and if the contestant gets it right, they get points, if not, they get pummeled by bubbles filled with Nickelodeon-worthy slime. The entire show is pretty gross and seedy, but all great game show hosts have to start somewhere.

I even have my own equivalent of Vanna White, a lovely bleach-blonde named Lucille whose main job is to bring out stain samples during the Name That Stain segment. She looks more like a dominatrix than Vanna White, though. She even whips people sometimes.

I finished today’s SED with only 35 minutes to spare! It clocks in at about 800 words. Here’s a snippet:

“Boys are stupid,” Lucinda sighed, lighting a cigarette. She took a drag and leaned against the grimy pink tile wall of the ladies’ room.

“Yep.” I fixed my black-red lipstick in the smudged mirror. “That’s why I stay away from them.”

“I need a belt buckle that says, ‘I’m with stupid,’ with an arrow pointing down.” She exhaled a cloud of smoke.

“Yep.” I slid my tube of lipstick into my purse and headed for the door. Lucinda followed me out. “You need a hobby,” I said. “Like knitting or painting or wicca.”

“Hobbies are for people with time. And talent. I have neither.”

“You’re pretty good at singing,” I offered. To be honest, the only thing I’ve ever heard her sing was one verse of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and, to be honest, we were both drunk. I figure if you can drink someone pretty, you can probably drink them talented as well. But I had to get her mind off Rick. Rick’s the reason Lucinda’s chain-smoking again. She’d been smoke-free for an entire year. Then he dumped her, citing the fifteen pounds she’d gained at her new desk job as the culprit, and she’s been a human chimney ever since. On the bright side, she’s lost five pounds. But I don’t think weight should matter. Especially fifteen measly pounds. Were it 300 pounds, Rick might have had a case, but seriously, all women have five-to-twenty pounds they struggle with. Even the skinny ones. Rick’s just an ass.

“You just need to find someone who’s—”

The cigarette fell from Lucinda’s lightly glossed lips and onto the sidewalk. She completely froze in place. I followed her gaze to . . . a parking meter? No. It was the guy standing next to the parking meter, getting out of a shiny white El Camino. He was cute, but a little too blonde and pretty for my tastes.

“Are you alright, Lu?” I nudged her. She didn’t move, but her eyes followed him down the sidewalk and into a nearby bookstore.

“Why can’t someone like that ask me out?” Lucinda asked. “And then love me for who I am, fifteen extra pounds and all?”

“To be fair, you’re down to only ten extra pounds now.” That didn’t seem to comfort her, so I changed the subject. “Why don’t you go talk to him? I mean, a bookstore’s a great place to strike up conversations with random strangers.”

I finished today’s story with slightly less than an hour to spare. I used a prompt from The First Line for inspiration. Brandy challenged me to write a story involving cupcakes, so here you go, Brandy! Here’s a small excerpt. I really like this one, so I’m definitely going to revise it and try to market it soon:

While not the intended effect, the outcome was surprisingly satisfying. I took one more bite of the cupcake, just to make sure the second bite was as gloriously delicious as the first. Sweet. Chocolaty. Moist. The cream cheese icing brought it all to a sumptuous head. I believe that I had indeed baked the perfect cupcake. I moaned a little as the creamy icing dissolved on my tongue.

“That good, huh?” My roommate Priscilla swaggered into the kitchen, a bucket of fried chicken in hand. I’ve never seen Priscilla cook a single thing in her life besides Pop-Tarts and Spaghetti-O’s. She’s my culinary antithesis. She eyed the sea of freshly iced cupcakes covering the countertop. “Mind if I try one?”

“Have at it.” Priscilla’s one of those annoying people who can eat anything and stay enviously thin. For this, I hate her. Priscilla’s eyes rolled back into her head as she bit into the cupcake.

“Jesus, Lolita, what did you put in these? They’re amazing!”

“Yeah, I know. It’s not what I expected at all. I don’t know. I bought this new seasoning at that little spice shop off the square—Piquancy Powder. I thought it would be like cinnamon sugar. Nothing special. The guy the shop said it was a ‘flavor enhancer.’” I wasn’t expecting it to turn my cupcakes into orgasmically scrumptious nuggets of deliciousness.

“They’re fabulous!” Priscilla polished off the remains of her first cupcake and immediately grabbed another. “Seriously, Lo, you should sell these things. People would pay you serious cash for these suckers!”

I shrugged, taking another bite.

“Maybe. I should make a few more test batches, though. Just to make sure it’s not a fluke.”

Finished my story for day 3 of the SED contest, with only about an hour to spare. It came in just short of 1,000 words. I don’t think I’ll post this one. It’s the first one I’m not terribly enthused about.

Well, I completed my second story for the SED contest! I didn’t think this one was ever going to end! It ended up being 2,800 words. I definitely want to revise and expand this one. I think the ending probably needs the most work. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Hell Mary and her sidekick Brimstone Eddie stood in the hopelessly long line for Splash Mountain. They were on vacation, under the aliases Cookie LaRue and Gerald MacPherson. Cookie and Gerald looked like your typical ugly tourists, but underneath the shell of bad clothing, Hell Mary and Brimstone Eddie still donned their uniforms, just in case. Mary and Eddie didn’t want to go on vacation, but they were advised by some very powerful individuals to lay low ever since the accident. The big red mark on their otherwise perfect crime-fighting records. Mary had toyed with the idea of giving up her Hell Mary persona forever. She felt she didn’t deserve it. But even if she gave up crime-fighting, her powers would still be there, a reminder. Eddie tried to be encouraging. If Mary gave up crime-fighting, where would he be? He was just a sidekick. He could never go it alone. His powers were a mere ember compared to what Mary was capable of.

“Let’s get outta here . . . Cookie . . .” Eddie felt odd calling Mary by a phony name. “This is asinine. We’re wasting our time and you know what else.” Eddie was short, maybe 5’4”, with wavy black hair that’d grown to reach his earlobes. Mary had always admired and been a bit envious of his milky white complexion. His coffee-black eyes peered into hers pathetically, like a puppy wondering why it’d been kicked. He was a delicate-looking man, however, underneath his deceptively fragile exterior, lay lean, agile muscles. As Brimstone Eddie, he was dizzyingly swift and light on his feet, though his real power lay in his ability to shoot fire and sulfur from his hands.

Mary ran her hand back through her sweaty, bleach blonde hair. A half-inch of brown roots stained the hair near her scalp, letting the world know she was far from a natural blonde. She’d become a completely different person since the accident. Ten extra pounds hid her old muscular frame, making her look more like the subject of a Peter Paul Reubens painting than a superhero. She’d stopped working out, ceased using her powers outside of using them to warm up TV dinners, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn makeup or bothered to fix her hair. Her slate blue eyes were constantly bloodshot from a lack of sleep and too much alcohol, and her fair skin had become pallid, like she was dying from the outside in. She stood eye-to-eye with Eddie.

“What would we do if we left?” she asked. “Go back to the Motel 6 and think about how pathetic we’ve become?” She paused to move up in line. “Besides, I like it here. It’s the happiest place on earth.” That was the cocktail of antidepressants talking. She cocked an eyebrow in desperate need of waxing.

“It’s fake,” Eddie mumbled.

“Shut up.”

Mary and Eddie eventually reached the front of the line. A cast member helped them into a car.

“You’re just—you’ll be making a big mistake if you stop using your powers to help people. You’ll be wasting your life.” Eddie kept his voice low. The car started moving. “I mean, what happened was really bad, but it’s just one thing. Look at all the good we’ve done.”

Mary said nothing, focusing her attention on the singing animatronic animals, occasionally singing along to what lyrics she knew to, “Zip-a-Dee-Do-Da.” Eddie would have used his flame-throwing powers on the saccharine creatures were he not in the presence of children.

The writer’s group I’m in is having a Story Every Day (SED) contest. For the next two weeks, you have to write a 500+ word story each day. It can be about anything as long as it’s at least 500 words and is a complete story. Quite a challenge, but I managed to grind one out today. The complete story is about 700 words. Here are the first two paragraphs. It’s not polished by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it’s a pretty good starting point:

As I rummaged through my grandma’s attic, amid all the old vinyl Andrews Sisters LPs, kitschy starburst clocks, and old kitchen gadgets, I found a dilapidated Red Goose shoebox. Expecting to find some sweet retro high heels or a pair of cute saddle shoes, I was a bit surprised when I saw that it was full of hair. Human hair. Scorched human hair. At one point it had been blonde and curly, but for the most part it was black and ashy. I touched it, imagining whose head it might have been attached to and how it came to be scorched. And most of all, I wondered how it found its way into a box in my grandma’s closet.

Perhaps back in high school, grandma was one of the outcast kids. The kind who smoked in the girls’ room and parked in cars with boys. One day when she and her gang of chain-smoking nonconformists were smoking in the girls’ room, the head cheerleader walked in, blonde, popular, and flush with school spirit. She threatened to tell the principle about grandma and her gang of ruffians. So, they gagged her with a wad of paper towels, snuck her out of the school, threw her in the trunk of someone’s old model T and took her out to a vacant field. To them, the cheerleader was a symbol of social oppression. She was the proverbial “man” keeping them down. They tied her to a tree. Doused her with some kerosine, and someone, maybe grandma, flicked a lit cigarette at her and watched her ignite. They kept these locks of scorched hair as a souvenir. A symbol of triumph over traditional social conventions. A triumph of losers over jocks. Greasers over socs. Drapes over squares.