The good thing about having to do only reading and critiquing for a few days is that once I finish, I'm always rarin' to write. I wanted to work on the novel yesterday, but had to hold off to finish reading a novel and a short story. But now that I'm done and free, the muse is slavering for some writing time and banging his fists to get started. Gotta make lunch first then I can turn him loose. Hope to have some good writing progress to report tomorrow.

I finished a first draft yesterday in time for the short story challenge at Liberty Hall, though it's a mess still. Now I have lots and lots of critiquing to do: 3 short stories and a novel, all due within the next week, so I don't anticipate any actual writing getting done in that time frame. Once that's all done and out of the way, I intend to get back to writing the novel. This is Gaaron's last week of school, and Dana gets out next Wednesday, so my "me" days will be over very soon. And I really won't get any when the school year starts up again since Gaaron's going to pre-K for only half days (though he will go five days a week, so technically I will get the mornings to myself every day.).

Yesterday I took one of my mice to the vet to have her eyes looked at, for she's been scratching obsessively at them and they're infected and almost swollen shut. I got a proscription  that none of my local pharmacies can fill, so I'm not sure what we're going to do about her eyes. I've been thinking about getting rid of them anyway, since they seem to be getting smellier and smellier and Dana doesn't seem much interested in getting the cage cleaned when I ask her too (which means I end up doing it because I just can stand the smell anymore. They are in my office, after all.). I might just take them to the Humane Society and sign them over, or see about the adoption program at PetCo.

Made good progress on the outline yesterday, finished a draft and have sent it out to some folks for their opinions. Then we'll see if I need to do another draft or if I can start on the actual rewrite. In the meantime, I'm spending the next couple days reading and critiquing a novel.

Been quite busy the last couple of days and failed to find the time to post to the blog. Mostly I've been reading, critiquing, and working out the rewrite details for MSR, which are pretty significant. And yesterday was Dana's 9th birthday and we went to IHOP for dinner (she was intent on having the Who-cakes, which just looked nasty, but some kids just have iron stomachs). From us she got the boxed set of Spiderwick Chronicles (which I was finally able to find for a reasonable price on Amazon, which amounted to about $6 a book, which is half off the cover price) and from my mom she got a Harry Potter sheet and quilt set (my mom made the quilt herself from HP fabric she found on ebay, and it's really very nice. If I was a kid...oh, who am I kidding? I want a Harry Potter quilt too!:D). We're going to repaint and decorate Dana's room next week with Gryffindor colors and I bought a set of the movie posters to hang on the walls. It's time to change her room anyway. We'd decorated it with Winnie the Pooh when she was 2, with painted butterflies and bees on the walls and a wall paper boarder, but she's older now and her interests have changed (and thank god she's into Harry Potter because the alternative she was gunning for was to paint her room bright pink and decorate it with Barbie stuff. And the pink she was begging for would have burned out retinas with its brightness. But having gotten the sheet and quilt set from my mom, she's excited about the new plan and color scheme. I told her she could choose any of the house color schemes, except Hufflepuff--because I'm not going to paint any walls black--so she chose Gryffindor).

The plan for today is to do more reading and critiquing and continue work on the outline, if I have time. I'm quite behind on the reading over at LH and need to do at least 2 stories a day now in order to have everything done in time to vote.

So after starting yesterday, I discovered I had a billion things I needed to do over at Liberty Hall, things I'd neglected to do for almost a week, so that ended up swallowing up most of the time I'd set aside for critiquing. I did jot down the basics of a crit, but wanted to reread the story and see if anything else stood out for me, but by the time I finished at LH, reading was the last thing I wanted to do. I'll finish it today though. I did work a bit on my new outline for NaNo, by transferring what I had finished into yWriter2, splitting it into scenes (though I'm disconcerted to see that yWriter's word count is about 3k less than the count in my Word document.). I did some thinking over what should happen in the next section, looked over my old outline, and today hopefully I'll start outlining from there.

The weekend will be spent at MileHiCon, which I'm pleased to see includes panels on both alternate history and historical research for writers. There's enough stuff of interest going on this year that I decided I'll go both Saturday and Sunday this year. 

I'm putting off starting on the new story in favor of sitting down and finishing reading a friend's novel today. I have until the 28th to do it, so I've been spacing out the reading so I don't lose any large chunks of writing time, but everyone else in the crit group has already turned their crits in, so I'm feeling like a slacker. I plan to finish reading the last 80 pages or so today and write the crit tomorrow or the day after, and once I'm done with that then I can get started on the new story. I also have my Paradox galley to check over in the next couple of days. Oh, and one of my stories has been short-listed over at GUD. Not sure how long I'll have to wait until I find out if I made the TOC or not, but that was a nice little bright light to the start of the day.

I'm back from 4 days in Hell...uh, I mean camping. It might not have been so bad had I not been sick and my asthma deciding to come back for a new round after years of not bothering me. I spent the entire trip wishing I had an inhaler, and worst of all, my breathing issues only got worse when I went into the trailer. On the upside, I got a ton of reading done while I was gone, three stories for the polish challenge and about 400 pages on Needful Things, finishing it. Last night I went out and bought The Gunslinger, so I'm going to try to conquer The Dark Tower series next. I really did like Needful Things quite a bit, and unusual enough, I really grew to like King's protag Alan Pangborn so much that I was really worried that King was going to kill him and I would fuming mad. The only complaint I have about the book was that it seemed to wrap up way too quickly and I was left wanting to know more about the aftermath of everything that went down (he could have gone on for another 100 pages and I wouldn't have minded.).

Anyway, today I have three more stories to read over at the polish challenge, all of novelette length then I have to get to work on posting crits. Busyiness to ensue

On the sub front, I got a near-miss from Coyote Wild on a story and the editor compared my story to some stuff done by Theodore Sturgeone, which makes me want to read some Sturgeone (is it sacrilegious to admit that I've never read any Sturgeone?). I sent it off to Murky Depth this morning.

Did a bit of submitting yesterday, one to Abyss & Apex, the other to Paradox (I'm so happy they're open again.). Today I have one crit left to do and currently I'm about a fourth of the way through the second reading. Once I'm done with that, I'm going to work on my new ending to "Love, Blood & Octli, and hope that over the weekend I can finish my cutting and other tweakage and finally get this one sent out to F&SF. I usually don't work on the weekends, but after losing both last Friday and this Monday to camping, I feel like doing so, to help me get caught up again.

Finished my reading and did one critique, then sent a story out to Abyss & Apex. I've found some new direction for the ending of "Love, Blood & Octli" and hope to get a start on rewriting that before the end of the week. I'm also thinking of withdrawing a story from Chimaera Serials tomorrow, since they haven't sent me a response to my query I sent last week and the place I'd like to send this particular story closes tomorrow. On the bitching side of things, what the hell's up with places that tell you not to query?!? I understand that they don't want people pestering them after a few days, but come on, not allow any queries at all? It's more professional to set an estimated response time after which it's okay to send a query, because we all know this isn't a perfect system and stuff does go astray. I'm learning to be hesitant about sending to places that have this policy. Grrrrrr!

This afternoon I rescued a huge toad from the back yard. The dogs were barking--well, actually, Lily was the only one barking and she never barks--and I went out there to see them chasing a really big toad around the yard. I watched them for a few minutes, because it was rather funny, watching them spaz out everytime it jumped, but once they had it cornered against the garden wall and Fiona started pawing it, I decided to put a stop to it before they killed it. So I scooped it up into the little mouse carrier we used to keep the mice in when cleaning the cage and took the big toad to my window well garden and put him in there. He should do okay in there; grasshoppers love my daylily and it stays cool in there most of the day. He's already burrowed under some of the ground cover. Earlier this spring I found him in the backyard, huddled against the basement door and I took him to the front yard, to keep him safe from the dogs, but he'd made his way back there again. We'll see how long it takes him to make his exodus to the backyard again (though he'll have to do some major digging to accomplish it since my window well is five feet deep.).

and now I feel like I could use a vacation from the vacation. The weekend was fun, until the day we left when Gaaron suddenly became ill and vomitting. Even last night he was still sick, though he seems to be doing better today. He's a trooper, and
Today I'm attempting to get back into a groove and started off by reading two stories from the polish challenge. Having read one before leaving for vacation, I have only one left, but still have to reread all of them to do the critiques, which I'm going to spread out over the rest of the week and maybe early next week. I just wanted to make sure I got them all read in time to vote.

The weekend was quiet on the sub front, not even a response from F&SF (though I'm anticipating it arriving today.). 26 days so far for that one, the longest they've ever kept one of my stories, and while part of me wants to read all sorts of a nice things into that, the other part is convinced that GVG is just running a bit behind at the moment and I should probably be giving the story one more go over for typos, so it's ready to send to Paradox as soon as I hear back from F&SF. It's kind of funny because while I'd of course love to sell GVG something, I still feel kind of impatient at the thought of having to wait longer than normal for what I think will probably be a rejection since if I'm to be rejected, I'd much rather have it happen sooner than later (but then who wouldn't?). Funny business, this writing gig.

A little bit of work done on the story today, but not much. I spent most of the morning reading and critiquing for my crit group. Most of the rest I spent reading over the big discussion about David Truesdale's collumn on sexism in SF. I haven't read the original column, and don't intend to because even from what Truesdale says it is, there's nothing new and interesting to be had in it. It has raised a big ruckus among some readers though and neither side seems willing to acknowledge the other side's point of view (except Charles Finley who is articulate and polite where others result to name-calling, as if that solves anything.). Also, there's been some accusations of sexism thrown at Gordon Van Gelder for publishing this particular column in the first place, which I'll say right now that I stridently disagree with. This discussion has once again brought to the forefront that too many women writers feel that Gordon is biased against women writers, and as a woman writer who subs regularly to F&SF now and for years before now, I'm left feeling like "What are you talking about?"

The first I ever heard of this "bias" was in conjunction with the slush-bomb last year. Before then, I'd never heard anything to suggest that Gordon Van Gelder was biased against women writers. And in all honesty, I'm wondering where this comes from. All my own dealings with him have been professional and I've never had the impression that he doesn't buy my work because I'm a woman. In fact, having gotten personal rejections from him in recent years, I'd dare say that he's actually encouraged me to continue subbing. It's never crossed my mind that he turned down my stories because he's sexist; I've always thought it was because they didn't meet his standards or his tastes for what he wants to publish, but maybe the next story will. And it's not as if I'm out a whole lot of my time if he does reject my stuff, since F&SF has one of the fastest turn around times in the business (I'll readily admit that I don't sub to Asimov's nearly as often because I sometimes decide myself that the story isn't Asimov's material and so I don't want to wait 120 days to have this confirmed. You might say that I only send my very best work to them.). In all honesty, I can't recall a single time in the year and a half I've been subbing in earnest that I felt like I'd been rejected because I'm female by any magazine (nor have I ever felt that my fiction was accepted because I am.). That's not to say that I haven't ever bought into the idea that the SF field is gender biased. When I first started writing SF with an eye towards publication, I chose to use my initials because it would, in theory, mask my gender in what I heard was a very male-dominated field. But I've never seen anything first hand to make me feel unwelcome, and that it's about anything other than what one writes and how well they write it. Naive of me, perhaps, but I'm not quite ready to embrace a jaded view point when I'm still very new in the field. Competition is hard enough as it is without adding this psychological barrier to the process.

So I critiqued 3 of 5 stories for the polish challenge today, and wrote a small bio for Sorcerous Signals. Not much else (though granted reading and critiquing three stories is nothing to sniff at.).

My TS Elliot trigger seemed to have gone over well with the flash crowd at LH, for lots of people entered and everyone seemed to like the trigger. Much better success than my last trigger. So I'm pleased by that. I didn't even attempt it, even for a DQ, for I have enough work to keep me busy through tomorrow and then I need to get to work on some writing. The Egyptian mythology story, I think. I keep saying I'll get back to that, so I should stop talkin' and start writin'. :)

So today was a day of submitting stories and doing a little reading. Sent a couple stories out, one to Heliotrope, the other to Aberrant Dreams. Been working on a crit for aliettedbbut got distracted half way through (I shall have it by tomorrow, aliette!), and hopefully once I'm done with that I will embark on new writing projects.

Tonight, steak and some Count Down with Keith Olberman, followed by American Idol, unless there's a movie on one of the Cinemax channels. They're playing mostly Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire right now though, and I think watching it three times in one week is enough for me (and I consider myself a pretty die-hard fan).

Spent today reading, critiquing, and working on the second draft of "A Gift Earned, Not Bestowed." Other than that, not much to report. I'm still plagued by cold symptoms, but am actually getting some work done, so that's a bonus. Hoping tomorrow I will have the second draft completely done.

Today is going to be very, very busy. I may be flying out to California in a day or two, so I'm going to try to finish all the reading and critiquing over at LH today. My grandmother has gone into kidney failure and the doctors are giving her four days, at the most, so I'm likely to not be around much for the next week or so.