Chapter 10
Publication Day!
Today sees the publication of another Wordsworth Short.
I wrote Going, Going, Gone a long time ago and then couldn’t place it in a British magazine. A friend told me about Women’s Era magazine in India, and I sent it to them. They ‘bought’ it and published it, but I apparently needed an Indian bank account in order for them to pay me. So I never got paid for it. I’d already sent them another story, which they subsequently ‘bought’ as well, but I didn’t send them anything more after that.
You can find all of my books on the BUY MY BOOKS tab on the blog, or you can go to www.books2read.com/DianeWordsworth.
An easy couple of weeks
Last week and this week have been and are easy weeks as far as the publishing challenge is concerned. I was expecting to be on jury service, so I scheduled a lot of work in advance.
When the jury service was cancelled, I suddenly had two empty weeks yawning ahead of me. And while it didn’t take me long to fill them up again, they’re still easy, relaxed weeks.
Project Management for Writers
Last week I started to write Project Management for Writers: Gate 2. This is due to be published on Monday 18 April and I’m due to finish the writing work on Wednesday 30 March. The poet will still have to look through to see if he wants to add anything to this instalment, and I’ll still have proofreading, revisions and publishing prep to do.
However, I’m going straight into writing Project Management for Writers: Gate 3 just as soon as Gate 2 is done. Then I’ll write the remaining individual volumes back to back, writing a chapter a day. Or that’s the plan at least.
Once these books are finished, they’ll go into the publishing schedule, and therefore be included in the publishing challenge.
Short stories
From today, I start to write a new short story a week. I’ll be brainstorming on a Monday, outlining on a Tuesday, writing the first draft on a Wednesday, writing the second draft on a Thursday, and doing the final proofread on a Friday.
Twice a month, these short stories will be written for regular magazines that publish short stories. If these stories are rejected, I’m hoping I at least get some feedback, but if I like them, they’ll be coming out as Wordsworth Shorts in the future.
This is what my recent date work has been for, so I can come up with something topical.
Calls for submissions
I’ve registered with Duotrope again, so that I can see any calls for submissions to anthologies, or even other magazines that publish fiction. As these calls for submissions come in, if they take my fancy, they’ll be inserted into the writing schedule.
I’m also looking out for the Chicken Soup for the Soul non-fiction anthologies and adding those in too, and others like them.
If I sell any of the short stories, I’ll wait until I’m free to use them again, and they’ll go into the publishing schedule as Wordsworth Shorts. I’ll only relinquish my copyright if they pay me A Lot Of Money. Generally, that means copyright will stay with me.
At the moment, I don’t have enough short articles to release those as anything. But I’ll see how it goes and decide if it’s worth starting a new series or collating them together in an anthology.
Writing challenge
Because the plan is to write something new each week, whether it be a short story or a feature, I’m going to start a new writing challenge: write a story a week for a year. I’ve already created the cover. It can be seen in the side-bar on the blog (to the right-hand side on a computer, or at the bottom on a mobile device).
This weekly story will usually be fiction, but I’ll include things like the Chicken Soup articles too.
Whereas I can publish books ahead of schedule, though, if I have a week’s holiday, then I’ll also probably take that week off the writing challenge. Unless I get an urge to continue while I’m off, which a lot of writers do. I just like to have proper, identifiable holidays.
That means that my ‘year’ might actually run to just over a year, as I’ll still include 52 stories in the challenge.
Over to you…
Do you have any questions? How is your publishing challenge going?
