 Red Room Writer Profile
|
|
Jeffrey A Ricker's Blog
November 21, 2009
- It's nine days until the end of the month, and as I expected, I'm behind. By the end of today, according to the handy meter on the NaNoWriMo website, I should be at 35,000 words. This is about 6,000 words higher than my current word count of 28,824. Luckily, we've rolled into the weekend, when I always manage to get more writing done. (I was 3,000 words in the hole last weekend, and I managed to ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
October 31, 2009
- Back in 2002, I did the National Novel Writing Month contest, where you set a goal of writing a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. I succeeded, after trying it in 2001 and failing, and ended up with something around 50,002 words. (Seriously, as soon as I saw 50K in sight, I thought, "Let's just wrap up this sucker.") I operated on a principle shared by my friend DJ: ...
- Continue Reading » 2 Comments
October 6, 2009
- (It occurred to me as I was putting away groceries that my relationship with Chapter Nine of the book is somewhat adversarial, and it made me think of the relationship between Kirk and Khan....)ME: Nine, you bloodsucker! You're going to have to do your own dirty work now! Do you hear me? Do you?CHAPTER NINE: Jeffrey! You're still alive, old friend?ME: Still. Old. Friend. You've managed to kill ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
October 3, 2009
- I've noticed a new recurring element that's been appearing in my writing lately. Before now, one of the things that came up a lot (“recurring theme” sounds pretentious, but I guess that’s what it is) was the notion of home and how to define it. Lately, though, I’ve been coming up with characters who’ve reached—not a crossroads; more like a mile marker, and they’ve turned around to ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
August 13, 2009
- I wrote two stories over the past year. (Actually, I’ve written more than two stories, but I’m talking about two stories in particular.) One was about a woman who woke up one morning to discover she was superhuman. Before that, she was ordinary: worked at Target, rode the bus, was a little overweight, thought her life was going nowhere. Suddenly, she had incredible strength and speed. At the ...
- Continue Reading » 3 Comments
August 4, 2009
- I'm sitting at my desk reading the headlines and drinking a cup of coffee. It's just past 6 a.m., so what I really should be doing is grabbing my keys and heading out the door for my morning run. When I let the dogs out this morning, it was already wet, slappy-washcloth humid, and the idea of running through soup is so not appealing. Nevertheless, I'll eventually drag my ass out the door to keep ...
- Continue Reading » 2 Comments
July 29, 2009
- Sometimes, rejection notices are actually nice. Like the one I just got from Gertrude Press, where I sent "Something Like Heaven" for their 2009 Chapbook Contest. Turns out I was one of three finalists. See? It says so here.I feel like I'm getting closer to something. The story is out elsewhere now, and I hope it finds a home.And I hope I finish chapter nine and this other story I'm ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
June 6, 2009
- What comes first for you when you're writing a story? For me, it's often an image or a single sentence, maybe a fragment of dialogue. This morning, though, for some reason, the first thing that came to me was a title. And I'm thinking, "That's great. But where's the story that goes with it?" I have a small collection of these that have popped into my head over the past few years. I ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
April 24, 2009
- As I said on my other blog, it's kind of like being Miss Missouri instead of Miss America (though it's certainly better than being Miss California), but I entered a story in Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction contest and just found out yesterday that it was a runner up. (And if you don't believe me, here's the PDF that proves it.) As my mother would say, that's better than a sharp stick in the ...
- Continue Reading » 2 Comments
April 18, 2009
- Cindy is always disappointed when I don't read.I belong to a writers group, Writers under the Arch, that meets every Tuesday. It's fairly informal, and I've been attending, off an on, for more than a decade (there was a span of several years where I dropped out, but through luck managed to find them again). The size of the group fluctuates, but the rules are fairly simple: Read eight ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
April 13, 2009
- I could repeat the chorus of outrage about Amazon.com's new policy of categorizing almost all GLBT literature by GLBT authors as "adult" material (and thereby removing those titles' sales ranking data and excluding them from some book searches, with the effect of marginalizing this category of literature even further). Instead, I'd like to direct you toward the Publisher's Weekly ...
- Continue Reading » 4 Comments
March 19, 2009
- I am a terrible procrastinator.Actually, that's not quite accurate. I'm a fantastic procrastinator. There is no task that I cannot put off. (I was going to post this yesterday, but I never got around to it.) The problem is that I am so easily distracted, and when it comes to writing, distraction is right at my fingertips. I could work on the third draft of chapter four, but I could just as ...
- Continue Reading » 4 Comments
March 2, 2009
- That said, I'm tickled to find that Red Room considers my writing good enough to deserve labeling me a Rising Star. (As I mentioned on my other blog, on Battlestar Galactica the Rising Star is, I think, the prison barge, so I'm not letting it go to my head.) An essay and a short story do not a writing career make, but you've got to start somewhere, right? And last week I did get notification that ...
- Continue Reading » 4 Comments
February 4, 2009
- This Monday I received my contributor copies of Fool for Love, which includes my short story, "At the End of the Leash." This is my first fiction publication credit. It took three years following acceptance of my story for this book to see the light of day, and it never would have if it weren't for Timothy and Becky and their tireless work. Imagine my surprise though to see my story ...
- Continue Reading » 0 Comments
December 18, 2008
- Three of my friends are unemployed. I have been distressed about this—though, I'm sure, not nearly as much as they are. And honestly, the past year that I spent being under-employed and searching for a new job cannot quite compare; I still had money coming in (albeit at a trickle), I had health coverage (though there was that point where I wasn't sure my employer was paying the ...
- Continue Reading » 1 Comment
