Monday Progress Update

Please note that there are two progress bars down at the bottom of the screen now. The shorter one is so that one of them actually has visible progress because doing 10,000 hours at a rate of about 2 hours a week it takes a while to start showing up.

Reading
I've gone back to actually making some progress reading through anthologies. It has been said, although possibly only by me, that only magazine editors read anthologies and only anthologists read magazines. The latter, of course, is not entirely true. One of our staff readers read the magazine before joining us, and so sometimes do authors planning to submit work, and occasionally my mom. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think there was someone out there reading The Fantasist because they actually want to, but then, I actually like reading anthologies as well. For the past year or so I've been working my way through Writing That Risks, Long Hidden, and Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing. Stories (and in the case of Writing That Risks, poems) from them are regularly occurring items in my planner.
I'm hitting more things I disagree with as I get to the parts of On Writing that are actually about the craft and process of writing fiction. None of the things King suggests are wrong or bad approaches, but they aren't mine, and he very much presents them as though they are universal approaches rather than an approach he, personally, finds effective. This is what my crankypost about Plot was about, and I'll probably be expanding upon that later. As a result, my progress on that has slowed down somewhat. There was also an unfortunate moment where he suggested, as part of an exercise flipping the typical gender roles of a story involving domestic violence, that since the abuser is a woman, she should perhaps have escaped a mental hospital instead of jail. It was the 1990s, I'm prepared to make allowances, but that didn't stop me from literally throwing the book on the floor.
I'm also finally making progress on The Wheel of Time again, so like, that is a thing. Almost 300 pages into The Gathering Storm I still don't really feel like Sanderson has the handle on how these people actually talk that I would like, but what are you gonna do?
Oh, and I'm gonna be starting 1984 soon. Like, probably later today. Because it was on my reading list. See previous regarding "what are you gonna do?" I want to have read it, and the only way I know of to get that to happen is to read it.

Writing
This is where the most exciting news is! I actually got some writing done! On my novel. One of my novels. Anyway, I transcribed 849 words of handwritten draft, which counts as writing because it's also where I do the first round of line editing, bringing the types total for this project to 4044 words. And I spent about 60 minutes doing more drafting, but I don't have a word count for that because I did it by hand. Marvel at my having done a bit less than a normal day's work for a working writer this entire month. But seriously, this is progress, this is good.
Essentially I got Elu (she's the protagonist) through some more walking through the desert being justifiably very nervous, into the beginning of another flashback that I don't know exactly what it's for yet.
I also had an idea for how to make an abandoned project with a premise I loved but a plot I absolutely hated (I'm just not built to write mysteries), into a series of short stories that will let me explore more of the world world I was building, on the general theme of Government Agencies Deal With Supernatural Citizens. Very little in the way of actual story ideas yet, but I feel 1000% better about this approach, and it can work in the same world as one of two other ideas I had for interconnected collections of short fiction. So maybe I'll start writing short stories again. That could be sort of cool.
Total progress on the 20,000 Hours project as of the end of last week is 8 hours and 46 minutes. That's 0.000877% of the goal.

Publishing I was reading a piece mostly to sign off on rejecting it for handling a sensitive topic badly, only then it wasn't, and I'm just so excited by this one story we have and of course I can't say anything specific but it's just 100% up my street and I know all of those feels, and that doesn't happen all that often, even running a magazine where I like most of the work we get sent. We closed submissions for this period, so now I really have to focus on reading through my share of the Unprecedentedly Huge Pile of Potentially Good Fiction.

Work
Paid Hours: 38.25 (I had a weekday medical appointment)
Unpaid Hours: 18.27
Writing Hours: 2 hours and 2 minutes.

Submissions from Other Languages

Every submission period, we get at least one piece from an author who clearly don't have English as their first language. These stories present an unusual set of questions, since most of them contain grammatical mistakes that we would never put up with from a native English speaker.

Is the language clear enough that we can follow what's happening in the story?
If we literally don't know what it's about, it's impossible to evaluate whether it's good enough to take it anyway.

Was it written in English, written and then translated by hand, or written and then run through Google Translate?
I don't care what language you're writing or submitting in, Google Translate is almost never the right choice for fiction. I could imagine a story using the awkwardness and inaccuracy of automatic translation as part of the story, but it would then have to be obviously good enough that we even read far enough to find out that that was going on.

How much work is it going to be to edit?
This is a question of both how many errors there are and how difficult they will be to fix. Where there are issues with pluralization, or verb tense, there tend to be a lot of them, but they're quick-fixes, individually, and I can work on it while watching The Great British Baking Show. Syntax issues are a little more time consuming, but not hard, especially if I know the grammar of the other language involved. Errors with similar sounding words with similar but not interchangeable meanings are not in any meaningful sense worse errors than the above, but they do require a great deal more thought. With a small staff and deadlines to meet, the extra time and energy cost can work against you, so it's worth taking the time to be sure whether you meant "immersed" or "emerged".

Does someone on the staff have a particular interest in the place you're from or the language you speak?
I studied Russian in college and I'd really like to read more Russian speculative fiction, so you're gonna earn yourself some extra bonus points with me if your first language is Russian, whether you wrote in English or had your work translated. A lot of us have one or more interests like that. Or we might have just been talking about how none of us has seen any speculative fiction from Place, and we wonder what the work being done there is like.

Will editing damage the writing style?
This doesn't come up all that often, but sometimes you get a great story that's written clearly enough to tell how good it is, but is still going to need so much or a kind of editing that it will obscure the writer or narrator's "voice", to the detriment of the piece.

Is it good enough to bother?
No matter where a piece falls on the spectrum of any of these questions, how much leeway there is will always be informed by how much we actually like the piece. I'm willing to do a lot more work for a story I really care about, and conversely less work for something I'm annoyed by or not excited about, even if it wouldn't take much work to get it to a point where it could , technically, be published.