tbonejenkins | Entries tagged with lashawn's work

When I was in third grade, I used to make up stories from spelling lists. Granted, the stories made no sense; but it didn’t matter. It was a great way for me to learn how to spell and how to figure out the meanings for words, and to have fun doing it. I didn’t know it at the time, but that little game was preparing me for writing fiction.

Back when I was starting to write professionally, I used to do what I called “Happy Fun Freewrites”. It was similar to the morning pages concept Julia Cameron practices in her book The Artist’s Way, where you write three pages a day about anything. In my case, I found a writing prompt and then wrote about it for 15 minutes. They weren’t meant to be published, just something for my enjoyment, but every once in a while, one of them was reworked into an actual story. (My short story “One for Sorrow, Two for Joy” came out of a Happy Fun Freewrite. It was a way to practice craft techniques. It was a way to get my morning pages in. But then I became full-time at work, and the little time I had leftover for writing was directed towards the novel or major writing projects. So I ditched the Happy Fun Freewrites because I just didn’t have the time.

Now that my time is more open again, I don’t know what to do with myself. It feels a little scary knowing that I can basically write anything I want. So rather than being frozen on figuring out what to do next, I’m going back to my roots. I’m bringing back the daily Happy Fun Freewrites. I miss that element of play and joy and discovery. And, to be really honest, it’s been a long, long, looooong time since I wrote short fiction. When I was just focusing on the novel or the novelette, I would get story ideas, and I would write them down, but I didn’t have the time or the energy to dwell on them. And over time, those ideas grew less and less, although they didn’t vanish completely.

When I was doing a bunch of organization a couple of weeks ago, I came across all my old Happy Fun Freewrites, and was surprised at just how many I wrote. It was heartening, but also scary, because it showed me that I used to do it all the time. Do I have it in me to write those again? Can I write like that again?

I decided to do a trial run this week and do the writing exercises in Ursula K Le Guin’s book Steering the Craft. I kept the exercises short. 350 words. Easy peasy. what’s 350 words? A few paragraphs. Not even a full page. On the last exercise, I wrote 600 words. Mainly because I had become engrossed and wanted to see what happened next.

Ah. Now it’s coming back to me. The joy and fun of writing.

But you know what…I think I need to bring some more incentive to it. Something that will hold me accountable. So I’m going to look into doing a Patreon or some other income generation. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do forever. I just never had the mental space to look into it…until now. It will get me back into writing fiction on a daily basis. It will help me improve my craft. And finally, it will give you, my readers, a chance to get more stories from me.

(…which is something else I’m dealing with. People actually do want to pay to read my stuff. It’s thrilling and terrifying and well, that’s the whole job of being a writer, isn’t it? So that’s the real reason why I’m doing this. It will help me improve, which gets better stories to you, which gives me a little income so I can find ways to improve more…and so forth.)

I’m still working out details and gathering information on how I want to do this. For instance, I want to offer other things besides stories: writing tips, faith thoughts, etc. And I need to figure out what type of stories I want to offer and the frequency. If I did flash stories, I can definitely churn out something every week, a la Ray Bradbury’s challenge, but a longer story will take a little more time. And I still want to send out stories to markets, so there’s that to consider. For any of you writers out there who use Patreon, or another income generating service, advice would be appreciated!

And, of course, all of this will have to wait until I get the novel out on submission, which is my biggest priority right now. So let me work on getting that out in the next couple of weeks, and then…well, stay tuned to see what happens next!

Current Mood: working

It’s been almost three weeks since I have finished the final edit of Weeping of the Willows. Since then, I haven’t played as many video games I wanted, but I did go down to Indy to attend Mo*Con. And if you’ve been on my FB, you’ve been seeing other ways I’ve been celebrating.

I’m now sitting down and looking at what I need to do to send this novel out. One of the first things I realized was that aside from get my novel out now now NOW, I had no clue where to start, how to do it, when to do it, or what I would be doing while the novel was on submission.

What I needed was to become organized. I needed direction.

I needed a submission tracking system.

Before I went full-time, I used to keep track of all my short story submissions in Outlook. It had been super useful. But then my job became more intense and my short story output sank so low so that I was only able to work on the novel and the occasional short story and ~~novella~~ novelette. Those I were able to keep track through Gmail, Submission Grinder and Habitica.

Now that I’m in my new position at work, I bring my laptop with me for writing, which means I don’t need to work across scattered apps. I also have more time to dedicate towards writing, and I have the headspace to actually plan things. With the novel being done, I need a new record management program, something more robust to keep track of queries and deadlines, and also help me get back into practice of writing and submitting short stories, as well as help me to brainstorm the next large writing project I have.

So I’ve decided to resurrect Outlook. Truth be told, I’ve always had it on my laptop for work related things, but I hadn’t opened my personal PST file since 2014. Initial impressions:

I had a running list of over thirty short stories I had started but never finished. That startled me, because I don’t remember being that prolific in my writing. It’s a nice surprise, and it tells me that I can be that way again.
It was also nice to see that I kept notes on the revisions of the novel. Granted the notes go back to 2014, but still that’s five years that I have been working on the final draft of my novel. It’s nice to have a record of that history.
I’ve completely forgotten how much I changed Outlook to make it work for my needs. I made my own task forms, I created my own custom fields, I created my own views so that I can one click of a button, I could show which stories were being worked on, which stories I decided to trunk, which stories were rejected and needed to be sent out again, and which stories had been accepted. I was an Outlook wizard. Seeing that made me feel good….

…until Outlook saw that I had opened an old folder and rather than wait until I moved the old data to the new folder, it instead updated the folder and in doing so, wiped out all the tracking information and submission notes for every story that I’ve ever done, including the novel notes.

anime-freak-out-gif-8

Okay, so now here’s your friendly writing PSA reminding you that backups are more for just stories. If you use any project management or tracking software, be sure to back those up as well. So after I picked my beating heart off the floor, I turned off Outlook sync, went to my backup, restored the old files, moved them to the proper new folder, turned the sync back on, and now everything is backed up and fine again.

OH DEAR GOD FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY PLEASE BACK UP YOUR SOFTWARE I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH REALLY I MEAN IT BACK UP YOUR SOFTWARE BACK UP YOUR FRICKEN SOFTWARE GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

So Outlook’s up and running, and according to my novel’s task list, the next step is for me to start researching and compiling a list of editors and agents. How will I do it?

Uhhhh…that would be the next post. Although suggestions would be appreciated (hint hint)

Current Mood: relieved

2018 was a bizarre year for me.

In order to explain this year, I need to back up a bit to the year of 2016. There was a whole bunch of stuff going on that year that I couldn’t really talk about online. The only way I could cope with it was by writing. So I wrote. A whole lot.

One particularly bad day, I was checking the twitters when this thread from Rachael K Jones popped up on my feed. And then, she wrote this:

And if I woke up to find a @TboneJenkins story in every major pro zine tomorrow, I'd weep for fangirl joy
— Rachael K. Jones (@RachaelKJones) August 10, 2016

That tweet stayed with me through the craziness that followed: selling our house, buying a new one, day job insanity, the election of 45. And then 2017, where I continued my push to finish the novel and got back into publishing nonfiction. All the while, the dayjob got busier and busier, and I was coming home more and more exhausted, until in May 2018, I realized that that if I was going to write more, I needed to find another job. Either one that was less intense or less hours.

So I started looking. It took way longer than I thought, considering that I hadn’t really looked for a new job in ten years. But I’m happy to say starting in February 2019, I be starting a new admin position. Same place, still full-time, but I'll get two afternoons off to write while keeping my benefits.

It’s a start.

Oddly enough, in 2018, as I searched for a job that will allow me to write more, I got a surprising amount of fiction and non-fiction written and published. In April, my short story “One for Sorrow, Two for Joy” was published by Fireside Magazine. In July, my novelette “Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good” was published by FIYAH magazine (this was originally the novella I wrote in 2016 before I cut it down to a more readable length). I also wrote a third short story that will be coming out soon, but that hasn’t been officially announced yet, so shhhh! But both the two stories mentioned above are eligible for awards, so read, enjoy, share, etc.

I also wrote a bunch of non-fiction articles, including an exploration of Nisi Shawl’s Filter House on Tor.com, a review of Janelle Monáe’s album Dirty Computer in Apex Magazine, and...heh hehe, another article that remains secret for now, but will be published sometime this year. And all of that while writing cover letters and filling out job applications and updating my resume.

Of course, with all the above, my editing input on the final draft of Willow tanked. As of today, I’ve only managed to complete 68% of the final edits. Which, actually, isn’t so bad, considering that I worked on it on top of all the other things I worked on last year but still. I laughed out loud when I saw the deadline I had originally set for myself, which was March 2018. Yeah, that sooooooo didn’t happen.

But it's now 2019. I got some time freed up. I don't have any writing projects pending for the next couple of months. Well, one, but it's a quick one. And, before 2019 ended, I fixed the last major chapter that needed serious fixing (chapter 27). So all the edits from this point on should technically go fast. I’m resetting the Willow Final Edit clock to March 2019. At 68%, I know I can do it. You can cheer me on at @tbonejenkins on Twitter. And then once I'm done, I can finally tackle the goals I had written for 2018.

Butt in chair, eyes on the prize. Let’s go.

Current Mood: rejuvenated

Should’ve posted this earlier this month, but yes! I got another short story out! “Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good” has been published in FIYAH’s Music issue, which you can buy now! It also comes with a poppin’ Spotify Playlist and another gorgeous illustration!

Ain’t that gorgeous?

If you’ve followed me on Twitter, you’ve heard about this one a lot. A few years ago, I stumbled onto the rockin’ blues gospel music of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, which I didn’t even know was a thing. That got me listening to more women who played guitars in the 1930s and 40s, and when I came across Memphis Minnie, I knew I had to get them into a story together. Also, I am so stoked that this was published a couple of months after Sister Rosetta Tharpe was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. Now if we can only get Minnie inducted...

I also wanted to write a story featuring my hometown, specifically, the south side of Chicago where I grew up. Fun fact--the real Sister Rosetta and Minnie actually did live in Chicago in different parts of their lives, but there’s no evidence that they’ve ever interacted. Seeing that most gospel musicians considered blues artists as heathens, I’m not surprised. On the flip side, Sister Rosetta came under a lot of fire for putting gospel hymns against “devil music”, so who knows.

The story give a couple of callouts to the history of the Chicago’s South Side: The Regal Theater, which was big for black entertainers in the 30s and 40s; the Ida Wells homes, a series of low-income housing mostly populated by blacks, and the Bronzeville and Bridgeport neighborhoods. And my favorite: Rita Moy, daughter of Frank Moy, mayor of Chinatown, who really did like to dress in men’s clothes. There’s even a picture of her!

Finally, I wrote this story because I wanted to show a relationship between two women of different beliefs. Sister Rosetta was an evangelist through and through, and she was also queer. Memphis Minnie, on the other hand, had a rough life: busking on Beale ave, doing a stint with Ringling Brothers Circus. Although Rosetta and Minnie never met in real life, it was fun imagining the sort of conversations they could have. You can read more about these women in their biographies: Shout Sister Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Woman With Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues. (Also for Minnie, there’s a description of her written by Langston Hughes)

And finally, listen to these women songs. I can repeat myself enough: they...are...AMAZING. Here, I’ll even get you started.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GcPlCeH2PU&w=560&h=315]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPGzKEhQUsw&w=560&h=315]

Current Mood: giddy

WisCon 42 is coming up in a couple of weeks and I will be there! For those of you who are going, here's where you can find me.

Friday, 5:30pm: POC Dinner

It's our POC annual dinner! If you're a person of color and haven't gotten your ticket yet, sign up here. Even if you can't pay, please sign up for a ticket so we know how much food to order. I'm also coordinating volunteers for the dinner to help with setup or cleaning afterwards, so you want to help, let me know in the comment section of this post and I'll get in touch with you.

Saturday, 4:00pm: Steven Universe Sing-along
From "Giant Woman" to "It's Over, Isn't It," Steven Universe offers a variety of beautiful songs in different genres that we can all sing our hearts out to. Hopefully we'll be able to sing up to the latest song "A Distant Shore" and WE WON'T LIKE BE TALKING ABOUT THE NEXT EPISODE AFTER THAT BUT DANG THAT PUTS SOME OF THE SONGS IN A WHOLE DIFFERENT LIGHT NOW DON'T IT.

Anyway, I will be there.

Sunday, 1:00pm: Reading @ Michaelangelo's -- Smash the Patriarchy
Join me along with fellow readers Monica Valentinelli, David Levine and Naomi Kritzer as we read stories that will unsettle you, make you uncomfortable, force you to think and feel. Come for the stories. Leave with possibilities. I'll be reading my latest short story, "One for Sorrow, Two for Joy", that was published in Fireside Magazine last month.

Sunday, 2:30p: It Is Our Time: A People's Celebration, Exploration & Analysis Of Black Panther
In which I geek out with a bunch of other people about Black Panther.

Monday, 11:30am: Sign-Out
This year, I got a whole bunch of stationary I want to use up. So if you visit me at the Sign-Out, I will write out a quick flash story on whatever subject you like. It will only be at the most a paragraph, at the most, 100 words, but hey, free story from me !

Of course I'll also be around just to chat, so if you see me, feel free to say hi!

(Unless I'm peopled out...or working on the novel...in which case, a wave would do....)

Current Mood: busy

Remember the story I wrote for the What Fates Impose Anthology? "There are No Wrong Answers" is now up at Podcastle, read by the awesome Podcastle editors Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali and Jen R Albert.

I thought I had written up story notes for this, but for the most part, I gave the background to this story in the interview I had with with Jim C Hines back in 2013, during the promotion of the What Fates Impose anthology. I'll let most of that stand for itself but I do want to reiterate:

This was the first story I ever wrote from start to finish in 3 months.
This might not be the last time we see Madame D.
Yes Marty is real...

...huggably adorably real.

Go check out the story, and if you like it, go buy the anthology What Fates Impose . Lots of great stories in there and you can get it on Kindle for $1.99.

Plus, you'll make Marti very happy.

Current Mood: working

Now that I got my 2017 Year in Review out of the way, I thought I'd take a crack at making writer goals for 2018. Do you know the last time I ever sat down to make writer goals? 2009. So let's get cracking...

Weeping of the Willows Novel: Finish final draft by March 31; Submit it by April 30
In case you didn't see my announcement on Twitter, I finished the 3^rd draft of my novel the last week of December. The 4^th draft will involve cleaning it up, making it look pretty, and moving it from Scrivener to Word.

Because I want this to be a polished draft, I would like to get this done as soon as possible. So after a brief rest, I'm going to tackle it exclusively over the next few weeks. Also, I'm going to do something I haven't done in a long time: I'm setting a hard deadline, because I want this baby to be done and out the door by the end of April. I'll announce my progress on Twitter to keep myself on track and for you all to encourage, cheerlead, poke with me a stick, etc.

Write seven short stories/poetry. Have 10 stories on submission
Once Willow is out the door, I want to tackle getting some short stories done. I already have one in progress, but I want to get more written and on submission.

Read more books!
Doing the Lightspeed book reviews has re-ignited my book reading. Most fabulous! I want to keep it going by taking the Goodreads 2018 book challenge. I know in doing the books reviews, I'll be reading at least 12 books, so 20 should be a good goal.

Get back into blogging more
This I've been meaning to do for a while. Facebook has grown less and less hospitable for writers. Going through previous posts made me realized how much I've missed blogging, and how I've neglected the Café in the Woods over the past few years. Now that I have free headspace again, it's time to revive the blog.

Right now, because of the last Willow revision, I just will be posting updates like this one. After Willow is submitted, I want to do an overhaul of the website. I also want to revisit some past posts I've done.

Reconnect with YOU
If there's one thing I've learned over the past few years is that I wouldn't be a writer today without my readers. A big THANK YOU to all of those who had stuck with me this far. Once I'm done with Willow, I would like to find a way to reconnect more with readers and fans. One thing I want to look more into is Patron or maybe do something similar to the Story Calendar I did a few years back. Remember that?

There's a lot more that I want to do, but this is a good start. See you when I start the last revision of Willow!

Current Mood: rejuvenated

It's that time once again for everyone to be posting the works they published in 2017 that are eligible for awards. And for the third year in a row, I don't really have that much published fictionwise.

Actually, no. I take that back. I'm looking at my bullet journal Writing Management Log (one of these days, I'll post on how I'm doing that. It's a todo in the journal!) and hey, whatdya know! I did have a fiction piece published in 2017. “The Summation of EvilCorp Subsidies HR Meeting Agenda Minutes, Compiled by Olivia Washington” was published by Fantastic Stories on January 2, 2017. This is the print version on the audio story I wrote for Podcastle, so I don't know if it qualifies for awards, but can't hurt to mention it.

The rest of my published works in 2017 were nonfiction. I had an essay in this year's WisCon Chronicles40 that was based off of my Tale of Two WisCons blog post. I also wrote an essay for Uncanny Magazine, "Learning to Turn Your Lips Sideways" in their May/June 2017 issue.

Then there are the book reviews. I did one for Time’s Oldest Daughter by Susan W. Lyons for the Fall 2017 issue of Cascadia Subduction Zone. And of course, this year I started writing a quarterly book review column for Lightspeed Magazine.

And that's just the published stuff. Writing wise, I pushed hard in finishing the revision of my Weeping of the Willows novel. As of today, I am revising the very last chapter. I'm hoping to finish it at this end of this month. I still have several stories out on submission, including the novella I completed in 2016. I also wrote a new short story, "One for Sorrow, Two for Joy" which, much to my delight, was picked up by Fireside Fiction magazine to be published sometime in 2018.

So yeah. 2017 was startlingly, surprisingly productive.

As for 2018, I'm going to make that a separate post. The past few years have been pretty rough (see my 2016, 2015 and 2014 Review posts), but finally, I feel like I have enough headspace that I can sit down and plan writing goals, something I haven't done in a long, long time.

But first, gotta finish this draft of Willow. See you on the other side of that.

Current Mood: thankful

I was doing some maintenance on my website, updating a few things, and I realized that I never mentioned here on my blog my essay that was published at the TWO-TIME HUGO AWARD WINNING Uncanny Magazine. It was published in their May/June 2017 issue...and things were a little crazy so while I mentioned it on Facebook and Twitter, I hadn't really gotten around to my blog and then dayjob stuff blew up and then other things happened and...

So HEY GUESS WHAT! I have an essay up at Uncanny Magazine called "Learning to Turn Your Lips Sideways". I like to think of it as an unofficial response to the Fireside Fiction report that was released a couple of months afterward the Uncanny issue.Yeah...let's go with that. Enjoy!

Current Mood: ditzy

Tis the season...tis the season indeed.

As you drink your eggnog and wrap your presents, you may say, "I want to give an ebook as a gift. What ebook should I give?"

You're in luck, because I'm dropping the price of my short story and poetry collection Into the Mist-Stained Woods: A Calendar of Tales to only 99 cents!

Think of it as my Christmas present to you...except, well, you're buying it from me, so really, it's actually a present to me...meh, don't think about it so hard. BUY IT!

I do plan for this to be the last month the story calendar to be up. After that, I will take it down. So this is your last chance. Buy one for yourself, buy one for your friend. And then pass the word around. Twitter, Facebook, Stumblr, you name it.

And then, enjoy!

Crossposts: http://tbonejenkins.livejournal.com/29968.html

A couple of weeks ago, I made the announcement that I will be putting together a Story Calendar ebook to raise funds towards my trip to Viable Paradise in October. After that announcement, I went on vacation, where I came down with a nasty cold and spent most of my time sleeping, eating, occasionally swimming, and reading. Lots and lots of reading.

Mainly, I was trying to figure out how exactly I was going to pull this off.

A lot of writers friends suggested Kickstarter, so I took a look into it. Kickstarter appears to be a great place if you want to raise funds for a project. You put in a proposal, get it approved, and you get your own page where you promote your project. Many successful ones offer varying levels of incentives to donate: if you donate 5 bucks, for instance, you get an ebook, but if you donate 20 bucks, you get an ebook plus a printed copy of the book, and so on. Many authors have put book projects up on Kickstarter and gotten their projects funded--some going above and beyond their original goal. (btw, if you want to learn more about Kickstarter, I suggest listening to Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing Show #212, in which she talks about her Kickstarter experience.)

I studied the projects and I thought, yeah, I can see myself doing this. The key thing is incentives. How can I pull in people through incentives. You can't just have an ebook. You need to get their attention, plus, you have to come up with incentives that people want.

So I started brainstorming. The successful projects had print copies as well as ebooks, so I added that. Then I thought, no, wait, this is a story calendar, right? What if I got actual calendars? First level, ebook, second level, a calendar, third level, a print book, and hey, let's put my calligraphy skills to work and make the fourth level a handwritten copy of any poem or story set in the donor's birthmonth...

I brainstormed, and I planned and I made notes. And then I did research into how much all this would cost.

Whoa.

I had figured I would need to raise about $1000 for my VP costs. To do this project on Kickstarter, I would have to factor in cost of calendars, print copies, paper for calligraphy, calligraphy ink (because I'm all out). Shipping for all that stuff here. Envelopes. Postage for mailing all that stuff out. Plus, factoring in Kickstarter and Amazon fees, and, that could easily kick up what I need to $5000. Plus, there's the time to factor in to get all of this done, making a video for the Kickstarter page (everyone suggest making a video) stuffing envelopes, ordering the print copies, making sure they all get in on time, doing the calligraphy, etc, and so forth. This would take several months of my time.

All this just to raise $1000 for one week in October.

Yesterday, it all came to a head when I realized I was seriously stressing out over it and I hadn't even started working on the ebook yet, something that I have never done before.

Looking at the ebook projects at Kickstarter, the successful ones always offered print copies as well as ebook, or at least promised print copies. So if I just sold the Story Calendar just as an ebook there, chances are, it wouldn't do so well, and I won't get anything, because Kickstarter won't give you the funds if you don't meet your goal. If, however, I put all my creative energy into just making the ebook, put it up here, at the Café, as a limited-edition ebook, and if 67 people bought it at $15 each, I would reach my goal. That's it. All I need to do is get the word out through Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus. 67 People.

So, as much as I hate to say it, I don't think I'll be using Kickstarter. Not this time, anyway. At this stage, I just don't think I'm ready, nor do I feel I'll have a worthy enough project to sell. The story calendar idea is great, but I have yet to figure out how to format it, and if that hinges on selling, then I'd rather put my energy into learning how to make an ebook than splitting it between an ebook, a calendar, and a print book. Baby steps first. My goal is to make it the best, awesomest story calendar you, dear reader, will ever spend $15 on.

And I'm not completely writing off Kickstarter. I'm actually pretty proud of the incentives I came up for the story calendar, and I do still want to do it. Just not now. If the ebook sells well here, then I want to try it next year, when I'm not so pressured for money and time. By then, the funds I'll ask for will go towards making the story calendar, not fundraising for something else, and I'll have enough experience to do it right.

Now, if you excuse me, I need to get to working on the stories of the Story Calendar. Finally!