I just got off the phone with mroctober. He said he loved my huli jing story, “Year of the Fox,” and wants it for his So Fey anthology. Not only did he fill my ear with glowing words of praise that made me all squeaky and gleeful, but he’s officially fulfilled another writerly milestone. He’s the first editor to call me to tell me they want to buy a story!
Happy happy happy happy happy!!
Packing Matthew up for Utah. He’s going off to emcee the TromaDance film festival. (TromaDance, sponsored by Troma Films, is one of the You-name-it-dance glut of independent film screenings at Salt Lake City and Park City that Robert Redford spawned with SunDance.) He’s also going to do a commentary track for the DVD of Roadside Attraction, one of the shorts featured in Dragon*Con’s 2004 Film Festival. Matthew gets to party with all the film happenings that are going on this week and rub elbows with film luminaries, and I can’t go because I have to work. Plus Hobkin would probably blow a fuzzy gasket if we sent him off to skunk camp again so soon after Christmas. Still, fooie.
So it’s going to be just Hobkin and me this weekend. I hope to get a goodly chunk of writing done. Realistically, I suspect there will be some vegging before the mass-entertainment altar of viewing, and unproductive fiddling and surfing on Mr. Computer. Maybe some napping too. I’ve also adjusted our Netflix list so as to get all the chick flicks this weekend that Matthew keeps pushing down the queue.
Words: 500. The novel continues to kick my ass. Thinking about switching gears again and working on a short piece. I seem to have a brain barrier erected against completing longer works. Dammit.
500/day
17
Well, it’s finalized. Matthew’s going to be a film festival judge and guest at the Midwest Entertainment Industry Conference in Kentucky in November. They’re getting him a room and everything. It’s very cool for him, but 1. he’ll be gone for the whole weekend and 2. it’s the same weekend as the ADSA skunk show. So, not only will I have to deal with being alone, but I also need to decide if I can manage taking Hobkin to the show all by my lonesome.
I really want him to go because I’ve been looking forward to having a chance to catch up with folks like puskunk and alijt as well as letting Hobkin hang out in a new place that’s skunk friendly. Plus I’m very proud of him and want to show him off. He needs to defend his “Prettiest Tail” title! But I’m seriously doubtful that I can do the show on my own.
For starters, I’m terrible with directions. I’m worried that I’ll get lost driving there, although Matthew assures me he’ll get me directions, plus I’ve been there before (last year for the 2003 skunk show).
Next, Hobkin hates car rides. We’ve always both of us driven him places–Matthew driving and me holding him to keep him calm. If it’s just me, he’ll have to be crated, which will incense and stress him.
Then, I have to figure out a way to bundle skunk, pen, blankets, litter pan, extra towels, skunk food, and any miscellaneous items necessary to keep a skunk taken care of for a day into a configuration I can manage all by my puny self. Last year, Matthew dropped me off at the door with Hobkin and a blanket while he went to park, and then lugged the pen and miscellaneous stuff from the lot to the site. He then set everything up while I held Hobkin because I am such a wuss. Without him to assist I’m at a loss. I can’t leave Hobkin in the car while I cart his pen and blankets and stuff to the site, and I can’t leave him alone at the site either. Best case scenario, I could leave him with a friendly skunk person while I wrestle with his stuff, but then I’d have to crate him for a while. I might be able to get everything bundled onto a wheeled luggage cart or something to make a single trip of it, but I don’t have a cart and I can’t imagine how I’d go about doing that. The rover gate pen itself is several large, unwieldy, bulky pieces, and the litter pan is the enclosed variety, also large, unwieldy, and bulky.
And last, but not least, I get hit by social anxiety in new surroundings. It’s relatively mild as far as anxiety issues goes, and it never manifests when Matthew’s with me, but it tends to overwhelm me when I’m on my own.
Dammit. I’d hate to miss the skunk show, but I see myself becoming totally stressed and having a meltdown. I don’t know what to do.
Today decided to decrease the number of chemicals thrashing through my system so I just had caffeine (double tall coffee) and sugar (pre-sweetened cereal) for breakfast. Result: continued twitchiness and an (increasingly annoying) under eye muscle tic. But also an absent headache until after lunch, at which point it reared its ugly face. And I returned to the miracle which is Sudafed.
Wrote up my review for this week’s Sci-Fiction story and emailed it to my Tangent editor. He still hasn’t published the last several reviews I’ve done. I hope his workload lightens up soon.
The words were insistent. They wanted out. Did they care that I didn’t have a plot, theme, or much of a storyline? No, they wanted out. So I made a start on yet another story. Sigh. 700 words. Need to finish something, dammit. Why won’t my muse listen to reason? The willful doxy!
Beginning to have a major jones for a sale. Again. Been over a month since my last one. Still conspicuously under thirty pieces out to market. Need to stick more irons in the fire.
Had a lovely day yesterday, despite the early AM wakeup. I did actually get to take a nap, with Hobkin as squeezy toy to make up for the morning. Matthew and I had a nice soak in the hot tub, and then watched The Bride with White Hair I and II, and Underworld. It’s October, high time to immerse in properly Halloweeny movies! Hurray for NetFlix.
No new words, and didn’t even finish my review for Tangent. But I did receive my contrib. copies of Leading Edge #48! Apparently my check was mailed separately. The editor assures me I’ll be getting it soon. There were three illustrations for “Of Two Minds in Lanais”! Very cool. And this issue is HUGE. It’s more like a book than a magazine. And I love ursalav‘s cover art. It’s even more delightful and fabulous in real life than rendered in pixels on the screen. Happy happy.
Hurray for Friday! It’s been a long week.
Hobkin’s winter coat is coming in, I think. He’s feeling softer and sleeker, although he’s still blowing his coat all over the place. At least he’s loosing far fewer of his long, coarse tail hairs; it’s mostly the short undercoat fuzz that’s littering our house now. I think he’s also beginning to put on his cold weather pudge. That would certainly explain the ravenous “feed me now” behavior that seems to have gripped him of late.
Slept a LOT last night trying to catch up on lost slumber. It sorta worked. Didn’t feel like my eyes were weighted with coins this morning.
But we got the last details on the contracts for “Still My Beating Heart” and “Inspirations End” hammered out before the phone gods intervened. He’s going to write it up and send me the finalized copy. And we discussed Nathan’s vision on how to lay the chapbook out as a flipbook. He’s going to pad the shorter of the two stories with ads and my author’s bio etc. at the end, to fill up the extra pages to the middle. Coolness!
This week’s Sci-Fiction story was late being posted. I saw yesterday that it had gone up (a new story is supposed to go up every week on Wednesday). And it’s a novella, woof. Due to that sleep-catching-up thing I haven’t finished my review for Tangent yet. I plan to do that tonight or tomorrow at the latest. On that note, I finally got an email from my editor. He’s swamped with work (80-hour weeks!), and is therefore a bit slow with the Tangent updates, but at least I know he’s alive and kicking out there.
Instead of writing, I’ve been spending my free time fiddling with my website and converting my bibliography to CSS tab navigation pages. It was getting too big to put on a single page (yay!), so I initially broke it down into fiction and non-fiction pages, but I wasn’t happy with that either. CSS to the rescue. My first effort, while looking lovely using IE, crashed and burned on Safari and Firefox browsers. My second effort appears to be working in Firefox now, but dude_the, my Safari browser tester, is offline until the weekend. Fooie.
If anyone out there is using a non-IE/Mozilla browser–Safari, Opera, Netscape, etc.–I’d greatly appreciate it if you could surf over to my Bibliography page and let me know if the tabs are showing up properly!
I think Hobkin is feeling the season and it’s making him restless. These last two nights he’s been very active, making it hard for me to sleep. He starts fussing about his midnight snack at 10, hopping up and down beside me to snuggle for a minute, and just as I’ve fallen into a light doze, hopping down to check to see if the food fairy had arrived yet (and thereby waking me). In the morning he wakes up at 5ish wanting his breakfast, a good two hours before his usual breakfast time (and a good hour+ before my alarm goes off), and pesters me to feed him.
My sleep has not been so good.
Heard back from Nathan. He’s cool with my suggestion of printing “Inspirations End” and “Still My Beating Heart” as a double feature chapbook. Both stories are in the 5K range, and I thought packaging these two together would be nifty, both being vampire stories–especially since “Inspirations End” is a reprint. Nathan suggested he print it flipbook style with the second book printed upside-down in the second half. That would be super spiffy ’cause it would mean I’d get two “front” covers with the resultant artwork. Except the stories aren’t the same length. And since the chapbooks are staple-bound, I’m uncertain how it would turn out with the stories not breaking exactly in the middle.
I absolutely adore Autumn in Georgia. The air is soft and cool, with a hint of the frost and winter sleep to come. Color has begun to tinge the trees with crimson, gold, and orange, and the evenings are perfect for snuggling. And best of all, it’s hot tub weather! Matthew cleaned and filled the hot tub yesterday, and we took our first soak of the season in it. Ahhhh.
Received the contracts for “Inspirations End” and “Still My Beating Heart” from Nathan at Scrybe Press.
I’m at 20 crits on Critters for the current offering. It continues to be a mixed bag. Some people really like it. Some people aren’t so enthralled. Some people like the whimsical elements. Others think it detracts from the theme. Sigh.
Can’t wait to receive my contrib. copies . . . and check.
To Matthew’s dismay, I totally disappeared into Incubus Dreams last night. So far, it’s been Anita relationship issues with secondary characters that haven’t really interested me all that much in the past. There was an initial foray into her crime-fighting life, but that has gotten fairly short shrift thus far. Waiting to see if it picks up. I mean, I like the hot and heavy stuff, but I’m missing the horror/murder mystery plots that always framed it. It’s reading like dark erotica right now, which is fun, but if I wanted to read erotica, I’d pick up some erotica.
Sleep was weird and wacky last night. Fell asleep on the couch at a ridiculously early hour–around 7PM–then woke up at around midnight. Matthew was putting on Resident Evil (a la NetFlix) and since I hadn’t seen it, I decided to put my glasses on, stay up, and watch it too. ‘Course, I’ve got a pronounced terror and aversion to shambling dead things. It’s the slow-moving scary things that get me for some reason. Leggy worms and zombies give me the screaming willies, but I’m dandy with snakes and vampires. So I watched about two-thirds of the movie, the beginning and the end, and took my glasses off and listened to the middle, zombie-laden third, periodically pestering Matthew with “So what’s happening now?” and “Who’s that screaming?” as I peered at the television with my egregiously myopic eyes. Blurriness is a good buffer against visual terror.
So now I’ve experienced Resident Evil sans the zombie portions. They captured the mood and feeling excellently–from what I saw. I really like the soundtrack and how well it meshed with the movie. I think Marilyn Manson should switch career gears and just do soundtracks.
I’m contemplating seeing Resident Evil 2, but somehow taking off my glasses (or covering my eyes) in the theater doesn’t seem right.
However, fun, escapist, adventure-horror flick notwithstanding, it means my sleep was fractured. I had a difficult time getting back to sleep after the movie, not because of the movie (since I had taken pains to immure myself from the Eugie-traumatizing bits), but because my brain wouldn’t shut down. Tossing, turning, miscellaneous limb repositioning. When I finally did fall asleep, it was a fitful slumber, chock full of weird dreams. Blah.
Facing another day of post dysfunctional sleep, I decided to aggressively self-medicate. Had a double-tall cup of coffee, a pot of green tea, and two Sudafeds. Result: pounding heart, sniffly nose, and the shakes. Mood: incessantly glum.
Stupid brain.
Fantasy story progress: 300 new words. I think I wrote myself into a corner. Not sure how, as I had the whole damn plot outlined in my head. But the main character ended up in a different place, personality-wise, than I planned, and now I’m stymied.
While stewing about that, I revived an old story concept. One of my writers groups is having a Shelley story challenge, where we all try to write something for Halloween. This is a story I was mulling a couple Halloweens ago for a Samhain-themed anthology but never made much progress on. It’d be ideal for the Shelley challenge, assuming I finish it. Looking over my notes and my initial outline, I think I know why I stopped working on it. The plot looks like it’ll be longer than short story length. Might end up being a novelette, maybe longer. I think I got discouraged when I realized that. Now that I’ve actually completed a novella-length work, perhaps I’ll be able to see this project through. Or maybe I’ll write a couple thousand words and give up again.
