Tag Archives: newly published

So this morning I was awakened before my alarm by what sounded like minions of the Elder Gods in our backyard announcing the imminent destruction of the universe.

As it turns out, it was only a couple of cats–a yellow striped kitty who I’ve never seen before and a spotted tawny and cream plumpy who is a regular visitor–either mating or fighting. I’m not sure which activity I’d feel better about, actually. If mating, then they’re ferals making more ferals and increasing the homeless feline population. Whereas fighting cats often inflict grievous wounds upon each other, and I don’t want either of the Elder God minions/kitties to be hurt.

Zounds, but they were loud.

But, in a wondrous turnaround of my morning, since I was awake, I booted my laptop. Figured I would check my email since I wasn’t getting back to sleep. And I discovered that teflaime, in what can only be described as a munificent and bountiful act, has gifted me with a Permanent LiveJournal account! *Squee!*

I knew that the LJ folks were having another Permanent Account sale, and I’d pressed my nose wistfully against the window of the “buy” page, but didn’t dream I’d get one. Huge *smooches* to teflaime!

I foresee that this weekend will herald much new icon making . . .

Writing Stuff

This week, I had three “author’s notes” pieces to write:
– “Beauty’s Folly” in the forthcoming issue of OSC’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. The editor, Edmund Schubert, does an ongoing series of author essays on his blog. This, incidentally, is the only one I managed to finish.
– “Li T’ien and the Dragon Nian” for the forthcoming Black Dragon, White Dragon anthology.
– “Honor is a Game Mortals Play” in Heroes In Training for a promo that jimhines is doing.

While I enjoy writing these sorts of mini-essays and think they’re great publicity, I also never know what to say. I get the same deer-in-headlights feel when folks ask me “where do you get your inspiration?” at conventions. I keep thinking I ought to having something erudite and/or droll to say, and instead, I feel like what I come up with is along the lines of, “well, I was staring at the blank screen of my computer, and it occurred to me that I should write something . . . ”

On a tangential segue, once, Ann Crispin suggested to me (after I hemmed and stuttered out a dull and rambling summary of the novel I was working on at the time) that I come up with an “elevator pitch” for major projects. Sort of a one or two sentence synopsis that I could blurt out in a seemingly off-the-cuff manner should I get the unforeseen opportunity to pitch a project in person to a publisher/editor. That led me to speculate whether I ought to come up with a series of quippy sound byte answers to the most common writerly questions I get like the aforementioned “inspiration, where?” one. ‘Course, the problem there is that my mind fuzzes out when I’m in a spotlight speaking situation. I’d undoubtedly never remember them.

Yup. When it comes to speaking, I verily suck. Wish I could carry around one of those portable scrolling marquees with the multiple programmable phrases. I could just flash my pre-composed witty repartee in blinking red lights.

Published:
– “The Tanuki-Kettle” in the July issue of Cricket. I just love what the Cricket folks do with my stories. The illustrations are by Taeeun Yoo, and I squeed out loud when I saw how she’d imagined the tanuki-kettle:

New Words:
– 700 on my Writing for Young Readers column. Hoping to double-check my references and have that formatted and to ye olde editor this weekend.

When a person’s passionate about what they do, it can make for some pretty obsessive behavior:
– My eating’s been on the scant side this last week. At my day job, I’ve been skipping lunch, opting instead to munch a handful of crackers out of the cache of edibles I keep in my desk so I won’t have to stop writing. And at home, I’ve been bolting my meals so I can get back to work.
– My sleep’s been patchy, and I haven’t particularly felt tired–although, admittedly, Adderall’s a great short-term sleep replacement. I went to bed well past midnight last night and woke before my alarm, eager to read fosteronfilm‘s feedback on my story and start on the first draft pass.
– I’ve been irritated with the driving portion of my commute, even though the roadways have been relatively uncongested (for Atlanta), because all I’ve wanted to do is get on the train as fast as I can so I could open up my laptop and get writing again. And I’ve generally been short-tempered and cranky at anything and everything that’s gotten in the way of me writing.

But finally, the story’s at first draft. I’m drained, strung out, and euphoric. But I think it might be decent . . . I hope. Next up, sending it out for critique.

Writing Stuff

Published:
– The Pseudopod podcast of “Wanting to Want” is up. Actually, it went up last week, and I didn’t realize until yesterday, when I got a note from the reader, Tabitha Smith, saying she liked the story. Still haven’t listened to it (see above re: obsessive writing), but I’m looking forward to doing so. Although I glanced at the comments and they’ve been less than glowing so far.

New Words/Editing:
– 900 words, a title change, a rewrite/editing pass, and “Fire Rabbit of the Clan of Bótù” is at first draft. I’d like to cut it down, since it’s at 9400 words, but at this point, I’m not sure what to cull. Hoping something bubbles up in critique.

Caught a rather embarrassing blunder that I’m glad I detected before anyone else did, and certainly before I submitted it. There are not two weeks between a first quarter moon and a full moon, only one–at least on this planet. Whoops. But, all fixed now.

And I’m waffling on which romanization style to use with regard to my characters’ names. I’m using the Hanyu Pinyin transliteration system, which is the standard of Mainland China, but it doesn’t normally use hyphens, instead stringing syllables together to make a single “word” and/or separating them with a space. However, I’m wondering if hyphenating would make it clearer that my characters’ names are chunks to be spoken as a unit, rather than a Western-style first and last name. However, hyphens are typically only used in Taiwanese names, which are romanized with Wade-Giles, not Pinyin. I’d like to make the hyphenating consistent with the romanization style, but Wade-Giles just bites.

Meh. I’m undoubtedly overthinking this. In my experience, native Chinese speakers don’t particularly care how their language is mangled into English. Hell, my mother spells my stepdad’s given name as a single word, and he spells it as two–which drives me nuts when I’m emailing them, as I don’t want to, y’know, commit the faux pas of spelling my stepdad’s name wrong. But if they think how his name is transliterated to English is too trifling a matter to come to a consensus on between them, it’s probably not something I need to wring my brain over for my story. As fosteronfilm pointed out when I tried to explain to him my dilemma, it’s not like anyone would notice (or care) either way.

9,413 / 9,000 (104.6%)

Club 100 for Writers: 16