tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-254900682008-10-07T12:25:04.395-04:00Because writing makes you do the wackyBarbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comBlogger136125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-11143350635251583162008-10-06T16:12:00.001-04:002008-10-06T16:13:47.260-04:00

I just saw that my flash story "Just Words" is now up in the October 2008 issue of The VERB, an e-zine for writers. I much prefer these Mondays of Pleasantness over Mondays of Writerly Pain and Suffering.

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-43593246302063647682008-10-02T17:45:00.000-04:002008-10-02T17:46:07.184-04:00

Dear Brain, Remember that focus thing you used to be so good at? I kind of miss it. What do you say we invite it over and hang for a bit? Because, you know, it really shouldn't have taken me two hours to come up with a handful of deity names. Yeah, sure, we got one sentence revised too, but the story's 6,200 words long. That's a lot of sentences to deal with. Love, Me

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-77011449019373625392008-09-29T14:39:00.005-04:002008-09-29T14:54:11.702-04:00

Life has kindly brought me another Monday that doesn't totally suck. Instead of rejections, today's mail brought me my contributor copies of issue 5 of Kaleidotrope, which contains a silly little flash piece of mine called "Efficiency." Shiny.

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-57705592351541667502008-09-27T15:27:00.004-04:002008-09-27T15:32:18.246-04:00

Haven't been posting much recently as things have been on the crazy busy side. I think I may have gone a whole day or two without mahjong or non-essential internet surfing earlier this week. Things will likely remain insane until a cabaret/fundraiser I'm organizing and performing in on October 12 is done, but I think I've got my ducks in something close enough to a row to warrant some

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-56559804299282173192008-09-15T14:11:00.003-04:002008-09-15T14:31:51.414-04:00

At last, a Monday that doesn't suck. There's a very positive review of my story "To Someone Who Needs Prayer" (from issue 61 of Hub) over at The Fix. And the other day, a nice comment about the story showed up in Hub's comments section for the issue, so yayness! This was rather refreshing since my last few Mondays have been a bit depressing in the writing department. Three weeks ago, I woke

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-24888169501900213482008-09-02T18:53:00.004-04:002008-09-15T14:11:01.032-04:00

I FINALLY finished rewriting the first damn chapter of my novel. That took entirely too long. Those pesky short stories kept distracting me. Also the occasional game of Mahjong, but let us not speak of that procrastination-enabling beast. I initially said I had finished "revising" the chapter, but "rewriting" is far more apt. I recycled some stuff from the original version, but I had to

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-70172061788890725992008-08-29T12:27:00.003-04:002008-08-29T12:28:46.022-04:00

Reason #1 First draft of story: Many people in Crit Group 1 think the protagonist is too slow figuring out what's going on. Second draft of story, in which the protagonist figures things out at the point suggested in previous crits: Many people in Crit Group 2 think the protagonist figures things out far too quickly. Reason #2 Significant number of crits: strong setting, lots of great detail

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-20440522254760039822008-08-21T16:00:00.002-04:002008-08-21T16:03:56.243-04:00

Saw Spamalot last night. Laughed my ass off. Life is good. In the writerly progress department, my muse has clearly called in some favors with the revision gods. Early August, I looked upon my ever-growing revision pile with a sense of impending doom. But ever since last week when I finally sat my butt down and got to work, I've been ripping through those bad boys with--dare I say it?--

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-14240057705029689462008-08-15T11:31:00.003-04:002008-08-15T11:37:29.174-04:00

The shore detox must have worked, because my brain has been very cooperative on the writing front this week, though it didn't look like it was going to be that way at first. I sat down to work on some short story revisions Monday and was overwhelmed with this horrible "I don't know what to do with this story! Why can't it work as is?" moment of writerly depression. So I finally stopped beating

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-56928892881908644642008-08-07T21:45:00.001-04:002008-08-07T21:49:16.238-04:00

The Shore Got back from Stone Harbor yesterday, with plenty of sand, craft fair purchases, Cape May wine, and sunburned shoulders to show for it. Twas fun, but between that trip and TNEO, I'm looking forward to staying home for a whole week before running away again. I've always been quite fond of my bed, and the bed-like torture devices I was subjected to at TNEO and the shore house have made me

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-36206812110030232702008-07-28T18:41:00.002-04:002008-07-28T18:44:48.489-04:00

Got home from TNEO on Saturday night after several hours of wacky road trip antics with one of my Odyssey classmates from last year. My brain is still a bit too fried to be coherent or detailed, but to sum up the awesome: I got to catch up with some of my fellow '07 Odfellows (begawk!), I met lots of cool new folks from other Odyssey years, I came away with lots of good crits and ideas (and

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-81719755126722136712008-07-17T10:45:00.001-04:002008-07-17T10:46:59.976-04:00

I received my first-ever unsolicited reprint offer yesterday. The Writer's Institute, Inc. would like to include my story "Love Spells" (originally published in Leading Edge) in a teaching anthology called Voices, which will be used as a component of one of their writing courses. I did my homework and everything looks shiny, so here's a yay! to my fiction being used to corrupt--er, I mean,

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-65382496351140051912008-07-08T16:05:00.003-04:002008-07-08T23:42:04.589-04:00

In other words, I just finished the last of my TNEO crits today. As of mid-June, I only had two left to go, but between the time spent on the previous TNEO stories and the critting I have to do for my in-person writing group every other week, I kept putting those two off because I was so darn sick of critiquing. Every time I picked up a story, I was overcome with an insanely strong compulsion

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-29081467056881072012008-07-01T17:12:00.001-04:002008-07-01T17:13:25.410-04:00

A reprint of my short story "Jarra" is now up in the current issue of The Lorelei Signal. There's a poll for favorite story in the issue, so if the spirit moves you, any votes cast my way will be much appreciated.

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-29127592452314492922008-06-16T23:34:00.002-04:002008-06-16T23:39:12.518-04:00

Life has finally returned to normal-busy instead of crazy-busy. At least for now. For the first day in months, I can say that, as of earlier this afternoon, I have absolutely nothing to critique. (At least nothing with a deadline. I can always find something to crit somewhere.) It feels wonderful. The round 3 TNEO stories could turn up at any moment now, perhaps even as I'm posting this,

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-49819641018940131452008-06-08T00:04:00.002-04:002008-06-09T13:28:25.387-04:00

I haven't had much time for posting lately, but I wanted to sneak in a quick one to say that my story "A Red One Cannot See" (or, as I've more frequently referred to it, my lemur-on-a-dirigible story) was accepted for Shimmer's Clockwork Jungle Book issue. That was a very nice email to find in my inbox this morning. Yay little lemur! And on the subject of a red that one can see, sunburn sucks.

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-73078586587801471602008-05-24T10:34:00.004-04:002008-05-24T10:55:25.932-04:00

Today's mail brought with it my shiny new copy of the print version of The Sword Review #27, which has my story "The Poet" in it. And I get to share the TOC with Marshall Payne, Michael Ehart, and some other shiny people, which brings additional coolness. On the productivity front, I finally started making a dent in the round 1 critiques I have to do for TNEO. It's a small dent, but a dent all

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-39307039529460960982008-05-13T17:02:00.004-04:002008-06-09T13:28:31.401-04:00

I was doing so well while working on my last story, but then I finished it and promptly went back to being useless in the writerly productivity department. On the plus side, out of all the ideas and story fragments on my computer screaming "Ooo, me! Pick me!", I had a very nice conversation with one Friday night, and I think we made a connection. I had to reschedule our first date a few times

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-72193646931734724222008-05-01T18:23:00.002-04:002008-05-24T10:56:51.618-04:00

And the tense-hopper is done, a whole two weeks before the next TNEO deadline. That feels good. I have to admit to tearing up a little while writing the ending, and then again today while editing the ending. If I can make someone else cry with this story, I will consider my mission complete--that is, of course, as long as they are shedding "oh, that was so sad and touching" tears and not "I

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-30597247950693299822008-04-25T16:18:00.004-04:002008-06-09T13:28:40.339-04:00

As some folks already know from me babbling elsewhere, I queried Hub on a submission earlier this week and received a reply that they'd like to publish "To Someone Who Needs Prayer." Yay-ness! Currently awaiting the contract and what issue it will be in, but I will be sure to shamelessly plug when the time comes. I think the story was up to about 1,600 words when I had it critiqued at Odyssey.

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-48430823377200932022008-04-16T15:46:00.008-04:002008-04-16T15:53:56.742-04:00

Yesterday was a new one for me in the writing department. I started work on a new story and was happily writing away in past tense when all the sudden, about a few hundred words into the piece, I realized I had switched to present tense. I figured, "what the heck, it's a crappy first draft that can be fixed later" and kept going. Next thing I knew, I had switched from present to past and back

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-35094764279916226002008-04-13T23:43:00.004-04:002008-05-24T10:58:24.987-04:00

So much for going to bed early tonight like I had planned. Oops. Anyway, I finally got my writing groove back on this past week and finished my story revisions in plenty of time for the first TNEO deadline. I feel better now. I first wrote the story in question at Odyssey last summer, and I have since come to lovingly refer to it as "the orgy story." Its actual title, however, is "The Sun's

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-18889969749879962892008-04-03T16:28:00.002-04:002008-05-24T10:58:52.118-04:00

We'll start with the positive. "Lucky Clover" received some nice comments over yonder: A Mystery That Reads I got myself all signed up for TNEO this summer. For you non-Odfellows out there, that would be the The Never-Ending Odyssey, a week-long workshop during the summer for Odyssey grads. Doing the short story track, though I may throw in a novel chapter as one of my submissions. The

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-85027543584618626462008-03-15T12:36:00.004-04:002008-03-15T12:50:53.196-04:00

It's almost St. Patrick's Day, so to help celebrate, I offer you leprechauns, clovers, blood, and some nasty-looking fairies. In other words, "Lucky Clover" is now up at Flash Fiction Online, accompanied by some damn cool artwork. So grab yourself a green beer or two, and enjoy!

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490068.post-85939222912705170542008-03-08T17:07:00.008-05:002008-03-08T17:43:05.457-05:00

First, the obligatory plug: A Time To ... Volume 2 - The Best of The Lorelei Signal 2007, which includes my short story "Second Moon" (the artwork by Lee Kuruganti that accompanied the story's original publication also graces the anthology's cover, and I think it's darn perty), is now available for purchase through Lulu as a trade paperback or PDF download. It should also be available through

Barbara A. Barnetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15031633304948114251noreply@blogger.com