Aigner Loren Wilson Writer & Editor
Literary Speculative Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Games
I'm at this really interesting point in my career, where I don't want to miss anything, in a sense. I'm doing what I have always wanted to do: be a professionally published working writer who tells a good story well. Like I look back over the places I've published and worked with over the past few years and am pretty flabbergasted.
Entering year five of the blog (!!!) and with a lot of my history as a writer stored here, I'm always wondering how to change or update the blog to meet my life.
Stories, stories, stories, and bread! But mostly story news about my novella, novelette, and short stories.
August is my short story challenge month, where I attempt to write a short story (+1,500-words) every day. I wanted to share how I'm able to write a new story within an hour a majority of days.
This month I'm working on revising (so many things lol), but one of those things is a short story! It's a secondary world fantasy where a young library page goes in search of her sister and the other girls who have gone missing from the city's library. As you can imagine, books and libraries play a huge part in the story and its themes.
On index cards sometimes just on a dry erase board or poster board, writers build a story just by its scenes. Instead of writing it out word by word, they draw or sketch it with images or words. Sometimes it'll just be something as simple as 'The Bad Man Dies' and some sketch of how the scene should look or take place.
Last month, I worked on a novelette set in a smart house. and this month I've been working on a short story whose main character is a house. The house of a killer who's kidnapped a new victim. The house and killer have an interesting relationship, you could call it a friendship. But what is a friendship when one of the parties lives and kills inside the other?
One of my favorite steps in the writing, editing, and revising process is spreadsheeting my story. Spreadsheeting a novel is when a writer or editor takes a story and breaks it out into a spreadsheet summarizing the story on the scene level.
I feel like I've been heavy in this cavern of learning and consuming over the past month. I don't think I've made any big sales, though I did hear back about a story being held for further review. Bittersweet news. I hope the story gets accepted, but if it doesn't, it getting held means the story is doing something right.
I'm currently editing (a lot of stuff!) a novelette about a newly married couple's honeymoon at the groom's supposed haunted cabin mansion in the woods. One of the main characters comes from a rich and well-off family with MANY properties, but none as famed, hidden, and haunted as their summer cabin tucked into the woods.
Aigner Loren Wilson Writer & Editor 