Tag Archives: writing sale

Session 2008 Day 37: In the homestretch and sale to Pseudopod

By | |
8 Comments

We’re in the final week of Session 2008. The legislature is scheduled to adjourn sine die this Friday, barring something stupid coming up. These next few days promise to be hectic to the extreme, but I’m relieved to be so close to officially surviving my second session. Also, I’m a little nervous now that “writing season” is about to start up again. After being away from it for so long, there’s some performance anxiety about getting back into the habit of putting words on the page. Meep.

   


Writing Stuff

Saw in the Baen’s Universe e-ARC area that “A Thread of Silk” will be in their June 2008 issue. Coolness.

Received:
• Promo copies of Magic in the Mirrorstone to sign. The Mirrorstone Books folks sent several copies that they want to use as promotional giveaways ’round to all of the authors to John Hancock. The instruction letter inside said that they wanted to get the books back before February—the anthology’s release date—but, um, unless their marketing department has a time machine stashed away, that’s not going to happen. Oops. Well, I’m sending them along to the next author tomorrow. At least there are only two stopovers left.
• 60-days to a (reprint) sale of “Caesar’s Ghost” to Pseudopod. Yay!
• Contract from Aeon for “Black Swan, White Swan”…along with a request for an intro. Erg. I have a dickens of a time writing intros or synopses for my stuff. As the author, I want to come off as witty and insightful, but definitely not ostentatious or pretentious, and I want to intrigue the reader with my story’s premise without giving away too much or building false expectations.

Yeah, for my next trick, I’ll turn Kool-Aid into brandy and walk on Jell-O. Much brow furrowed lip-chewing, there. I came up with something and sent it off, but I’d rather write a whole story while aardvarks gnaw on my ankles than a one-paragraph introduction. *twitch*
• Payment from both Drabblecast (for “The Tiger Fortune Princess”) and Pseudopod. Yay²!

Session 2008 Day 34.25: a sale to Aeon and annoyance with the USPS homeland security policy

By | |
12 Comments

Had a quiet Easter weekend with fosteronfilm and Hobkin. Stayed in, cuddled a skunk, and watched Donnie Darko. Hey, there was a bunny in it.

The Georgia legislature is in adjournment until Thursday—which will be Day 35 of this session. It’s been relatively quiet at work, giving me a chance to play catch-up, but it seems that as soon as I start making headway in one area, stuff starts piling up in another. I can’t seem to get my email down to less than 50 “needs response” notes, some of which are egregiously late, as I have a terrible habit of responding to email in last-in-first-out order rather than first-in-first-out as I ought. It feels a bit like using a tablespoon to bail out a leaky boat…that’s headed into a waterfall…in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Also, I’m miffed with the USPS. Apparently, a recent homeland security policy of theirs now mandates that all stamped mail which weighs 13oz or more must be dropped off at a post office rather than mailed from a residential mailbox. Because, of course, the folks who work the counter at the post office will have a much better detection system than my local letter carrier when it comes to terrorist mailings of over 13 ounces.

The thing is, I’ve got a no-frills postal scale at home, and my standard operating system is to stock up on various denominations of stamps so that I can disseminate review items for The Fix as I get them*, without having to set aside time to drive back and forth to the post office. But now, I can’t do that with any material that’s heavier than 13oz, like, oh, say, most trade paperbacks and glossy magazines. ARGH!

The only thing that’s saving me from really pulling my hair out is that I’ve been encouraging editors/publishers for the last several years to send me electronic files instead of paper. So now, the majority of the review material I receive is electronic. But I still get enough hard copies that this is going to be a major inconvenience and, with fuel prices being what they are, an annoying expense.

Stupid USPS.

In other news, I’ve migrated my eugiefoster.com website to PHP, specifically WordPress. My experience with webmastering and helming The Fix has really sold me on the application, even though I don’t update my homepage with anything like blog-like frequency. The flexibility of being able to make site-wide changes easily as well as the browser-based admin interface really appeals. Now I can chuck FrontPage—which always inserts gobs of junk into my code that requires clean-up—and not have to worry about learning DreamWeaver. Shiny.

*I also use it for my paper submissions, but there’ve been fewer of those over the years as more and more markets accept submissions via email.

   


Writing Stuff

Hmm. Well, it seems that “Daughter of Botu” is not, as it turns out, going to be in the June issue of Realms of Fantasy. Not a problem, but now I’m wondering which issue it’s slated for. Did I misread my contract and it said June 2009 instead of June 2008? Or was it just bumped to next issue or something? Must remember to check that when I get a chance.

Received:
• 98-day SALE of “Black Swan, White Swan” to Aeon. Woohoo! I’ve been trying to break into these folks since they premiered. Delighted that this story will have such a wonderful home.

But I’m also all fretty. The acceptance email indicated that their contract should have been attached to it, but it wasn’t. I sent a “please resend contract?” email last week, as soon as I got their acceptance, but haven’t heard back, and I even succumbed to my twitchy writerness and sent a follow-up from a different email address yesterday. I’m sure it’s that they’re very busy—and probably not that they’ve changed their minds, seen that it was a brief bout of insanity that prompted them to receive positively something I wrote, and are trying to come up with a kind way of telling me never again to darken their virtual doorstep with my prose—but my on-again/off-again email reliability issues have really ramped up my writerly trepidation and apprehension.
• Note from Drabblecast that their production of “The Tiger Fortune Princess” is scheduled to go up this Wednesday, huzzah! Also that they’re passing on another submission I sent them, pook.
• Email from the editor/publisher of Fantasist Enterprises:

Fantasist Enterprises Needs Your Help

When I started Fantasist Enterprises almost ten years ago, I had three major goals in mind: 1) Create new markets for short fantasy fiction. 2) Help re-grow the popularity of the short story as a literary form. 3) Bring illustrations back to literature in the artistic marriage that the Pre-Raphaelites so championed.

I’ve certainly learned a lot since those early days, in respect to writing and editing, art directing, and running a publishing company. I’ve also met numerous friends, mentors, and students over the years—something that is infinitely valuable. It has been a joy to work with so many talented writers and artists.

Now FE and I need your help. We need to raise awareness of the company and sell more books and art in order to complete our upcoming projects and break exciting new ground in the genre. You can help us reach our goal in many ways.

1) Spread the Word . . .

. . . through your own words: If you have read our books and enjoyed them, please recommend them to your friends. Consider posting reviews on Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com, and anywhere else that book reviews are welcome.

. . . with banners: Add a little visual flair to your website, blog, or MySpace/FaceBook page with FE banners. Go to our banners page for directions on how to add them to your page.

. . . by wearing T-Shirts: Want some FE art on your person? Then check out our T-shirts on our swag page

2) Buy a Book or Art

Buy an FE book through your favorite book retailer or direct from us at www.FEBooks.net, where we are running some specials for a limited time (see below). The stunning art found in our books is available exclusively on our website.

DEAL 1: While supplies last, purchase both FANTASTICAL VISIONS I & II for a total of $12.00.

Yes, FE and I were still cutting our teeth on those publications, but there are some memorable stories to be found within their pages. And soon, they’ll be collector’s items!

DEAL 2: Purchase both CLOAKED IN SHADOW & MODERN MAGIC for a total of $24.75.

DEAL 3: BASH DOWN THE DOOR AND SLICE OPEN THE BADGUY is on sale for $12.75.

So yeah, not only do I support small presses, especially ones that publish short fiction, but these folks had the excellent taste to publish “Souls of Living Wood” in their Modern Magic anthology and “Mistress Fortune Favors the Unlucky” in Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy, and they’ll be publishing “Megumi’s Fire” in their forthcoming Paper Blossoms, Sharpened Steel. So buy a book, y’all! Pleeeease?

Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy

Modern Magic

Session 2008 Day 31.5: Atlanta weather and return of the prodigal laptop

By | |
4 Comments

The tornado was a nonevent for us. Didn’t even realize one had ripped through downtown Atlanta until we got calls from fosteronfilm‘s mother worried about our safety. Up north where we are, we got dark skies and thunderstorms, but no twister action. The hail on Saturday was a bit more dramatic, but we seem to have withstood that without any damage, too.

And, my laptop’s back, my laptop’s back! Yay! It languished for over a month in the shop, and in that time my organizational system fell into total disarray. My to-do list reached profoundly scary proportions, and after I finished re-loading my system and trying to sort through my emails, I’d flagged nearly 100 emails as “needs response.”

While I had a back-up system to work on and check email from while my VAIO was gone, it’s a huge behemoth of a machine that I can’t easily transport back and forth on the train. Plus, it doesn’t have the battery life that my ultra-portable VAIO does, making it useless by midday. So I ended up leaving it at home and checking email from a browser interface at work—and therefore not having my address book or sent history or received archives at hand. And without a main system as the hub repository for all my data, I ended up accumulating duplicates and putting off items or having information scattered across multiple systems in different versions. What a mess.

But my laptop’s back home now, and I’ve been wading through the pile-up. As of this morning, I’m down to 60 emails flagged, and my files are more or less synced up. Whew. I’m worried that some stuff may have gotten lost in the cracks; I tried to err on the side of duplication rather than deletion, but then I tried to keep the duplicates manageable and…glargh. I hope to have everything shipshape by the end of this week, legislature obliging, of course.

I missed my little VAIO. A lot.

   


Writing Stuff

Received:
• 125-day SALE of “The Better To…” to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, slated for #38—which I believe will be their October issue.
• 91-day very glowing and personal rejection from Space & Time. It got held until the final round, but…sigh.
• Contract from Drabblecast for “The Tiger Fortune Princess.”
• Payment from Realms of Fantasy for “Daugher of Bótù,” which I believe will be coming out in their next (June) issue.

Session 2008 Day 29.5

By | |
2 Comments

We’re in the home stretch. The legislature has established their schedule through Day 38, which will be the 27th of this month. That means they’ll most likely adjourn sine die the first week of April, hopefully April 1 or 2, which is much earlier than last year, with sine die falling on the 20th.

Good thing, too. I’ve switched to taking my Imuran in the A.M. with breakfast instead of at night with dinner because the schedule for my evening meals is all thrown off with session. There have been nights when I’ve had to skip dinner altogether and just make due with snacking at my desk between bills—resulting in me forgetting to take my meds. This brought on a (thankfully very minor*) flare-up last month, and I realized I needed to swap my pill-taking time so it could coincide with what’s left of my daily routine. But taking it in the morning often makes me a bit queasy, which it doesn’t do at night ’cause I usually take it with a hefty meal versus the cup-o-yogurt that I have in the morning.

Trade-offs. Queasy or pained-feverish? Blah.

*It’s been so long since I had a real-for-sure flare-up that I didn’t recognize it at first. I couldn’t figure out why my joints and muscles were aching so much…until the fever and dizziness came.

   


Writing Stuff

I’m in a bit of shock that Speculations and its wonderful Rumor Mill community are gone. While I haven’t been all that active on it, I’ve been a member—subscribed to several threads, checking in on folks’ author topics, etc.—since I began writing seriously in 2000. It was a great resource and a great community, and I’ll miss it.

Finished up my 2007 short fiction readings (yes, I’m behind) and finally got my picks to Chris McKitterick for this year’s Sturgeon Awards. I’ve been honored to be asked to contribute to the nomination process for the last several years, and this year I had to ask for an extension on the deadline as I was so utterly swamped at work and couldn’t get my nominations in on time. But I finally managed to send them off yesterday.

Received:
• 44-day reprint SALE of “The Tiger Fortune Princess” to Drabblecast. Yay! The editor, Norm Sherman, actually solicited this one from me. He’d heard Escape Pod‘s production of “The Snow Woman’s Daughter” and liked it enough to both email his compliments and ask me to send something his way. Much shiny ego-boo.

Session 2008 Day 25

By | |
9 Comments

This week has been incredibly grueling, and it’s not even over yet. fosteronfilm has had to drive me home twice in three days*, and Hobkin was feeling under the weather on Tuesday (he seems fine now; I think he’s stressed because I’ve been away from home so much).

Bad week, no cookie. Need. Weekend.

One of the unlooked-for silver linings of my laptop being in the shop is that I’ve been catching up on my reading on the train. On the nonfiction front, I’m reading Robert Epstein’s The Case Against Adolescence, which expounds upon a subject I’ve been soapboxing in one way or another since I was 13, which is how the infantilization of young adults and the artificial extension of childhood, as well as people’s preoccupation with ensuring that their children are insulated from anything and everything that has even an iota of hazard in the world, is incredibly dysfunctional for both young people and society as a whole.

A fascinating read, although not particularly revolutionary for me, as I already hold to the belief that young adults are much more capable than most people give them credit for. But Epstein puts it together articulately and presents some historical pretext as well as research findings and ethnographic studies that I wasn’t aware of previously. (For more information about Epstein and his book, check out this Psychology Today article.)

As an amusing cosmic synchronicity, fosteronfilm mentioned that he’d heard my advisor in graduate school, Dr. Laura Berk, on NPR the other day but couldn’t remember what the subject matter was. I continue to hold Dr. Berk in the highest of regard and esteem (I’m also co-author with her on a textbook resource on Child Development—my first taste of that oh-so-addictive “name in print” goodness). So I went out to the NPR website and discovered this article, “The Bryant Park Project,” focusing on play and child development, particularly with regard to executive function—of which a central aspect is the ability to self-regulate**. And I thought it most telling that there’s been a marked decrease in childrens’ ability to self-regulate in the last six decades or so. The fanaticism to safeguard children from the world is retarding the natural rate of maturity and creating increasingly incapable young people.

Gripping stuff (to me, at least), even if it paints a rather bleak prognosis for the state of personal accountability, sound judgment, and capability in general for present and future generations.

* We’ve agreed that if I have to stay at work past 9PM that he’ll come get me rather than me taking the train home.
**Executive function and self-regulation is a good predictor of future achievement and well-being. From the article: “Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child’s IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, ‘Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain.'”

   


Writing Stuff

Got a(nother) note from a writer asking me whether a review had been published of his collection yet. Not an unusual occurrence, save that this is the third or so such note I’ve gotten from him. And also that he continues to address me as “Dear Editor.” It’s not hard to find my name on The Fix‘s website. Really, it’s not. But it is hard for me to feel disposed to respond to someone who doesn’t take the trouble to address me by name. Maybe I should reply “Dear Writer”…

Yeah, yeah. I’m feeling snarky. Blah. It’s been a taxing couple weeks.

Received:
• 76-day SALE of “Megumi’s Fire” to the Fantasist Enterprises Paper Blossoms, Sharpened Steel anthology. Woot! I lost count of how many people sent me a heads up when these GLs went up, but thankyouthankyou to each of y’all!

Session 2008: Day 11

By | |
3 Comments

Got up extra early this morning to vote. I voted. A less exciting undertaking in practice than theory.

So, yeah, my life = blurred frenetic haze of legislative editing punctuated by non-legislative editing for The Fix.

I’m finding the editing mindset a bit hard to break out of…in an OCD sort of way. dude_the was here* for our annual Superbowl shindig (the only football game I watch), and we were out doing the Saturday beer run at the Wine Shop. Not being much of an alcohol drinker (or buyer), I amused myself by reading the wine descriptions. Three sentences in, I found myself with pen in hand, busily adding in the missing serial commas. fosteronfilm dragged me away before I could finish (or attract the ire of the shopkeeps). *twitch*

But we’re now on Day 11, over one-quarter of the way through Session 2008. Rah.

*Actually, dude_the is still here, as his flight was cancelled last night, but I’m not sure if I’ll get to see him off from his extended stay—or at all—as I’ll probably have to work late again tonight. A bummer, as he got back from his wranglings with Hartsfield-Jackson airport last night after my bedtime.

   


Writing Stuff

Rich Horton (ecbatan) singled out my story, “Honor is a Game Mortals Play,” as one of the best in the DAW anthologies from 2007. *Squee!* (Thanks to jimhines for the heads up!)

Received:
• 23-day reprint SALE of “The Life and Times of Penguin” to the Triangulation: Taking flight anthology. My first sale of the year! And it came with an exceedingly complimentary acceptance letter from the editor, Pete Butler. It was his first acceptance letter (written) of the year, too. Hee!
• 44-day personal “not right for us” from Weird Tales with an invite to submit again. The sale gods giveth and they smacketh. Sigh.
• Payment from Llewellyn for “A Nose for Magic” after a bit of worrisome email straying. Seems they sent me a request for a W-9 for tax purposes which they wanted me to send back before they could cut my check, but I never got the email—I suspect an overzealous spam filter, paired with the lack of a subject in the original email, was the culprit, as I do check my spam folder regularly for misfiled correspondences. It was purely by luck that I saw the follow-up, recognized the “Llewellyn” in the return email addy, and fished it out.
• Note from palmerwriter letting me know that Voices for the Cure (the charity anthology to benefit the American Diabetes Association with my story, “An Interesting Week for Emmy,” in it) is now available through White Rocket Books, which means it’ll soon be available at Amazon.com and B&N.com, too. Yay!

A Tale of Two Feral Cats

By | |
70 Comments

I’ve been feeding a couple feral cats. Actually, at first I thought it was just one, but upon closer inspection, I realized it was two (which explains the amount of food being eaten, as I couldn’t fathom how a single kitty, even a single starving kitty, could snarf that much down). In my defense, they look pretty similar, both gray tabbies with white feet:

Kitty 1 (pictured) seems to have hurt her (his?) paw, favoring the right front one. Don’t know if it’s an old wound or a recent one. You might be able to see that she’s holding it to her chest above. She was limping a couple weeks ago, but appears to be able to walk on it now.

Kitty 2 looks almost exactly like Kitty 1 except her tail is less fluffy, and her white feet are shoes only, lacking a white sock up to her elbow that Kitty 1 has.

They’re both extremely skittish and won’t come to the bowl if either I or fosteronfilm are on the porch, although Kitty 1 will crouch beside it on the edge of the porch—just out of reach—while we’re filling it, waiting for us to go back inside before coming to eat. I’ve tried to make friends with her, but she’s not inclined to have our relationship grow any closer than it is, meowing plaintively at me if I linger, talking to her, as though asking me (politely) to please leave so she can get on with her breakfast.

My plan was to trap them both and take them into a vet’s to be fixed (and looked over) and then releasing them. They’re both very feral, and I can’t imagine either of them becoming tame enough to make the transition to being an adoptable housecat. But now I’m rethinking whether I ought to trap them or not. britzkrieg informed me that she recently trapped a feral just a few blocks away from our place (in j_hotlanta‘s yard) which ended up testing positive for FIV. It was too feral to be adoptable, and a FIV-positive kitty can’t be released back into the wild, so she had no choice but to have it put to sleep.

The odds are higher than I like contemplating that any feral in such close proximity could also have FIV, and I don’t want to have to euthanize these kitties. I know it’d be more responsible to bring them in and have them evaluated (assuming I could trap them), but the thought of my well-meaning action resulting in tragedy gives me the shudders.

Pointy-sharp quandary.

   


Writing Stuff

Received:
• 13-day SALE of “Beautiful Summer” to the Killers anthology (edited by Colin Harvey, to be published by Swimming Kangaroo Books). This came last month, actually, so it’s an end-of-year hurray rather than a first-sale-of-the-year ring-in.
• Contracts for “A Thread of Silk” from Baen’s Universe and “Daughter of Bótù” from Realms of Fantasy.
• 22-day (or so) rejection from Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling for the story I submitted for their next anthology. Sigh. Disheartening and disappointing is an understatement, but I’ve been clinging to my “it was an honor to be invited” mantra.

Published:
• “When Shakko Did Not Lie” in the Jan. 2008 issue of Cricket, and it’s the lead story. Yay! “Shakko” has been awaiting an issue to be slated in for some time, and it’s been a while since I read it. Getting the contrib. copies and reading my story over was a little like seeing an old friend you’ve not heard from in ages, familiar but also new. Very pleased that it’s out now.

Shiny cover:

Need more December!

By | |
10 Comments

Agh! This month is zipping by too quickly! I can’t believe Christmas is next week! Haven’t sent out any Christmas cards (and I think it’s past time to concede that I’m not going to this year), and hardly anything is wrapped. Also, things are ramping up at work. Had a few days last week that felt like session was already upon us. (Eek!) And I definitely want to finish the WiP before session begins.

But, in the flurry of December, fosteronfilm and I have managed to catch a couple of fun flicks. We attended the Sweeny Todd advance screening on the 5th as well as Enchanted last week. Delightful pair of movies…in totally different ways—although the idea of a Sweeny Todd/Enchanted double feature appeals to me in a twisted fashion, and hey, they’re both musicals!

But between them, I liked Sweeny Todd best. Tim Burton’s just got a macabre gift for lushly beautiful cinematography, and with a stellar cast of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman, it was gruesome, lurid, and decadent—a gothic fantasy of a movie. Check out fosteronfilm‘s review.

After the final scene, I leaned over to Matthew and giggled: “Everybody die. Die die die”—my favorite mantra when I’m stressed out, overwhelmed, and being attacked on every side by hamsters. (I’ve found it works much better for lowering the blood pressure than “om mani padme hum.”) Matthew’s heard me mutter it under my breath on several occasions, and it happens to also be the perfect synopsis of the movie’s plot as well as its theme. Hee!

   


Writing Stuff

Received:
• 240-day SALE of “The Tortoise Bride” to Cricket. This makes my 13th sale to the Cricket Magazine Group and my 11th to Cricket magazine. Woot! I hadn’t sold anything to the Cricket folks in over a year, and I was beginning to fear I’d lost my appeal to them. So I was verily ecstatic to get their stamp of approval on this one.

‘Course now I don’t have anything in their slush pile. Wonder if there’s any chance I can get my current WiP and a new folktale written before session starts…not very likely, but I know I’m capable of producing that amount of wordage in that timeframe; I’ve done it before—although I think that was before I agreed to helm Tangent and now The Fix. Hmmm.
• 95-day pass from IGMS. A bit dismayed at this one. I’ve sold to them before, and this was a form rejection from the assistant editor. Trying not to engage in rejectomancy…
• 147-day complimentary and personal “not for us” from Spacesuits & Sixguns with invite to submit more.
• 139-day kindly no on a reprint from Rachel at Podcastle after holding it for a second round.

New Words:
• 1500 words on “Morozko.” (4272/3500) And, yep, my word-count-fu is totally on the fritz. I’m just hitting the last scene. Undoubtedly there’ll be room for culling when I start into my rewrite/editing, but at 1K+ over my original estimate, I don’t think I should be trying to gauge story lengths until I recalibrate my story-length-o-meter.

Skunk: 1; Christmas Tree: 0

By | |
24 Comments

So I got an email this morning from fosteronfilm with the subject “Famous last words” reading:

The Germans can never attack through the Arden.
The Hindenburg will work fine on hydrogen.
The Christmas tree will be perfectly safe from Hobkin on the lower speaker.

The last sentence being, of course, foolishly uttered by me this weekend as we were putting up our Xmas decorations. Seems this morning, while I was at work and Matthew was asleep, the fuzzwit pulled some ornaments down, turning one into so much Styrofoam confetti, and terrorized a wooden mouse.

We’ll be moving that tree higher . . .

   


Writing Stuff

Received:
• 619-day SALE of “A Thread of Silk” to Baen’s Universe. Woohoo! This one was definitely worth the wait! I’ve been dying to break into these folks.

New Words:
• 500 words on WiP, “Morozko.” (2785/3500)

Pagan Fiction Award finalist – “A Nose for Magic”

By | |
60 Comments

So I got a phone call a couple weeks ago from the publisher of BBI Media letting me know that my story, “A Nose for Magic,” is a finalist in the Pagan Fiction Award contest and is slated for publication in their anthology. Unfortunately, I missed the call and it went to my voice mail, but she left a return number. So the next day, I called back . . . and got her voice mail. In addition to leaving a message, I sent her an email.

Several days passed as I gnawed my fingertips (as my nails have, long, long ago, been worn to nubbins). Realizing I needed my fingertips to type with, I emailed the editor.

Crickets chirping.

Agh! Had I been smited by the gods of communication? Had it been a mistake? Did my story actually suck, and they dialed my number in error? Aghhh! *twitch*

But then last night, I got the official press release:

PanGaia Magazine and Llewellyn Publications are pleased to announce the finalists from the Pagan Fiction Award contest. These thirteen stories, listed alphabetically by title, earned the top scores:

• “The Bitter Herbs of Camelot” by A.C. Fisher Aldag
• “Black Doe” by Vylar Kaftan (Yay! Another score for fellow Launchpadee and all around rawking grrl, Vy!)
• “Dead and (Mostly) Gone” by Deborah Blake
• “Draw Down” by Alex Bledsoe
• “From Our Minds to Yours” by C.S. MacCath
• “A Nose for Magic” by Eugie Foster
• “The Rune Hag’s Daughter” by Linda Steele (endelarin)
• “Seabird” by Paula R. Stiles
• “Selk River” by Melodie Bolt
• “Silkie’s Diary” by A.C. Fisher Aldag
• “Under a Double Rainbow” by Sophie Mouette (safirasilv‘s alter ego)
• “A Valkyrie Among Jews” by April
• “We Have Come Home” by A.L. Waldron

First, second, and third prize winners chosen from this list of finalists will be announced at Pantheacon, taking place in San Jose, California February 15-18, 2008.

The stories will appear in a book titled Pagan Fiction Anthology: 13 Best New Pagan Voices to be published by Llewellyn in October 2008.

I’m verily pleased that this story found a good home. It was inspired by and features Hobkin. So, herein, a couple pictures of my non-crack-whore, fuzzy muse:



A close-up of Hobkin’s inspirational nose.

   


(More) Writing Stuff

Received:
• Note from the Cricket folks letting me know that my story, “When Shakko Did Not Lie,” is slated for publication in their January 2008 issue. Woot!

New Words/Editing:
• An editing pass to get my focus back and 250 words on “White Rabbit” (4750/5500). Although the word count was pretty unimpressive, I made good headway on the story progression. I guess I should listen to my crack-whore muse when she drags her feet. I needed a scene in there to establish foreshadowing, and I didn’t realize it. Now that it’s there, I think the rest will progress at a good clip. I hope. I’d really like to get this baby to zero draft by week’s end.