For those who love Steampunk

[Asilynne]

Thought I'd share this with anyone who may be interested, it could be a good opportunity to be published! I just found out about it today, I would like to enter and still may but the deadline is very soon so it would be an effort ^-^() If I thought the NaNo was hard!!!

The genre has to bee steampunk and they prefer it to be between 2000-6000 words, though longer or shorter would be accepted on a case to case basis. Here's the link: http://www.kindlingpress.com/submiss...forsubmissions

If you plan on doing it, good luck! And wish me luck should I attempt

[Gavin Luper]

How cool. Steampunk is such a quirky genre but it seems to be rapidly getting more attention. Full disclosure, though: Most of my limited knowledge of it is generated from Panic! at the Disco's video for "The Ballad of Mona Lisa". ^_^

Do you think you'll enter, Asi? Good luck if you do!!

I'm personally saving my strength for NaNoWriMo ... it's weird to think it begins in just three months now!

[Asilynne]

I'm really going to try I've been really lazy with writing lately but I do have a fun story idea I haven't started yet for the steampunk genre so I'm going to try to grab myself by my shirt scruff and make myself do it XD I'm also going to show my roommates, I know Ben would be interested and maybe Sarah.

My biggest challenge is starting something and not overloading the first few paragraphs with too much character/setting detail ^-^() got any pro tips or advice?

[Gavin Luper]

Awesome. Good luck with it then. And maybe having your roommates knowing about it will make the need to complete it more pressing and tangible, if that makes sense.

Advice? Man, I wish. Beginnings are the hardest things for me, too - I reckon the same goes for most writers. I think you're right in paring down the amount of detail you put into your opening exposition. I always try to resist the urge to explain every little facet of a character or a setting as soon as I think of it/as soon as there is a chance for it to be mentioned in the story, but this isn't always the best thing because, as you say, it can overload it and that really does drag it down, and your beginning should feel anything but dragged down.

So I guess my advice is just reinforcing what you already said - don't overload it, keep it simple and let the character's personalities and the settings be evoked gradually as your reader is carried along - it keeps the reader more engaged, too, when both the people we are reading about and the world that they are in retains an element of mystery. Perhaps the key to engaging the reader for an extended period of time is, to an extent, retaining the mystery. Once we know everything about character X - every element of his appearance and every element of his past and every thought and attitude he has - it's easier to disengage, I think. Likewise with the setting: if it remains more unknown, it remains more interesting.

Hope that helps to some extent, even though I think I was mostly 1) repeating what you already said but in more detail and 2) realising all of that as I wrote it. ^_^