Fortnightly update 52: 22.11.2021 to 05.12.2021
In this blog series, I share my fortnight-to-fortnight triumphs (and failures) as a writer. Despite all the ups and downs, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Spinning Yarns
So for the past eight months I’ve been working (in secret) on a podcast with my good friend Patrick. It’s not quite ready to go live yet, and I’m not counting this as “the big announcement,” but I think it’s time to share a little something-something.
Spinning Yarns with Nick & Paddy is a podcast about storytelling in all its forms. We read and critique our own stories and poems; talk about books, movies, TV shows, video games, music, etc, and chat heaps of shite.
So far, we’ve recorded five episode and intend to release the first three by mid January. It turns out there’s a lot more to podcasts than we first thought, but we’re up for the challenge. I’ve been doing all the sound stuff myself. It ain’t easy, but I’m getting there, and our episodes sound pretty great! We’ve set up a basic website with a placeholder logo and hope to have a proper logo at least a week before release (it’s in the works). You can find a little more information about our podcast on said website. I also made a Twitter account for Spinning Yarns, and I plan to get that ball rolling very soon.
If you like stories and want to hear two idiots talk about them, keep an ear out. I’ll hopefully be announcing more next fortnight and over the next few months.
The boys’ll dazzle listeners with the sheer wealth and breadth of their conversational content, carefully curated for them in lovely little half-hour chunks, in which they’ll pinwheel freely between such diverse subjects as video games, homoeroticism, cinema, bodily fluids, short prose fiction, existential ennui, pieces of poetry, a mutual crush on Anya Taylor-Joy, and the very human need to laugh maniacally at the ever-encroaching spectre of death.
Short fiction
I’m currently submitting short fiction, mostly flash fiction and short stories, to online magazines and such for publication. I submitted my first simultaneous submission this fortnight. I hadn’t been doing that until this point (I’m not sure why), but it makes sense to do so if I can. More lines in the water equals more fish, no? That’s if they’re biting. I’m also about to start a fresh short story, set in WWII-era Macedonia and loosely based on the setting of my grandad’s memoir, which I’ve mentioned a few times in the past (on that note, I’ve almost finished editing the memoir!). I can’t wait to start this one, although I wish I was writing it from a cabin in a dark forest, not sunbleached Australia. Oh, I also wrote and submitted a spooky Christmas story. An acceptance would be a nice Christmas present, but I’ll take coal if that’s all that’s on offer.
Here are this fortnight’s stats:
Submissions: 4
Pending: 8
Rejections: 0
Acceptances: 0
Rejections 2021 (from June 8th): 25
Frontier Media
I write scripts for Frontier Media, a media production company specialising in YouTube. Our two largest channels are The Front and Geetsly’s, and while I’ve written a little for Geetsly’s in the past, I mostly write for The Front and our new, smaller channel The Braved. Four of my videos went up this fortnight. I particularly like the one on Switzerland in WWII. Total respect for those guys, caught between a rock in a hard place.
And here are my total stats:
Videos for The Front: 112
Videos for The Braved: 44
I write 280-character stories and poems using various writing prompt hashtags, mostly #vss365, on Twitter. I wrote just one this fortnight. One day, one day, I’ll get back on track with this because these little stories are truly valuable in terms of sparking creativity and fresh ideas for longer pieces.
#ribbon
A length of police ribbon still fluttered from the front door. The windows were smashed, and the walls bloomed black with mould. But just for this one night each year, I could return here and be with the shadows of my family. Just for this one night, it was home.
Conclusion
This fortnight was mostly about pushing onward to the end of the year. I’m busy tying creative loose ends and getting ahead on my client work so I can drink way, way too much eggnog on Christmas.
Thanks for reading <3