Morning Star Rising

54,977 / 150,000 (36.7%)

Not much work done the last couple of days. Jeff's taken the week off from work and so we've been doing things with the kids. Yesterday we went to Elitch Gardens amusement park and spent the day there. Finally got back to work today, starting off with getting some critiquing done. I also went over the galley of "Night Bird Soaring" for GUD, and for the first time, I've actually felt really good about a story that's been accepted. I'm not sure why, but usually after I've sold a story and read through the galley, one of my reactions is "Good grief this is horrible! What was the editor thinking to buy this?" I'd like to think that I have a lot of confidence in what I write, but obviously it's not as much confidence as I'd like to have. How to get over this, I don't know, but for the first time, I read a galley and came away feeling "that's a story to be proud of." I think it may have something to do with the fact that usually when I'm reading a galley, I find all sorts of things I wished I'd done differently but now it's too late. This story though I went through draft after draft, critique by a couple of my most trusted readers, and even was critiqued by Carina Gonzalez through her Zen Pen critique service. This story even got me out of the slush at F&SF. It ended up at a semi-pro magazine, but a snazzy-looking one with editors that showed great devotion to the copy-editing process (this is kind of interesting because I've seen references to bad copy editing in reviews of the first issue, so obviously they took that criticism seriously and made efforts to correct that. Copy editor Julia Bernd even went to so far as to check my Nahuatl and help me correct and streamline what I'd pretty much put together from a jumble of difference sources--I have much better reference books now than I did when I originally wrote this story). I really have nothing but good stuff to say so far about my experience with GUD and encourage everyone to submit their work there. The icing on the cake would be if the story comes with an illustration (I don't know if it does. I probably won't find out until my contributor's copy comes). Anyway, this is the first time that I've read the galley and thought, "I really love this story." It might get thoroughly torn apart in reviews, but I don't think that would change my opinion of it; for me it's my favorite of my published works.

My 200th submission since starting to submit in earnest back two and half years ago went out today, "Water Mecha Songs" to Murky Depths. throws a bit of confetti

Still working on the outline. Not much else to report. Boring, I know. :)

So The Spiderwick Chronicles was really very good and I'm glad we went to see it. Dana enjoyed it tremendously too and we just might go out and buy the books to read together.

"Love, Blood and Octli" made Dave Trusdale's 2007 SF and Fantasy Recommended Reading List, which is very cool and a first for me (and I'm thrilled to see that two of my TOC mates made his Best of Year list, so big congrats to Tom Doyle and J. Kenneth Sargent!). A nice little milestone.

Today's task is going to be to go through the journal and tag everything, to make it easier to find things. I've never done any tagging so it's nearly impossible to find anything, especially when I go back looking for stuff I wrote months or even years ago, so, since it's snowing here (it was 70 degrees yesterday, this morning it's blizzarding, but that's Colorado for you!), I'm going to work on fixing this. 

I actually don't have much to report, thanks to my internet connection being spotty at best yesterday (which was tremendously frustrating) and it appears to be doing the same today. I'd probably be better off just disconnecting the internet for the day and writing and stop obsessing so much over it constantly shutting off then turning back on.

Thank you everyone for their birthday wishes for Gaaron. All the presents went over well, though he's particularly enthralled with the Transformer (he was also quite impressed when I told him that I had Optimus Prime when I was a kid--and strangely enough I won it in a contest at the same Safeway that Jeff was working at at the time (I was 11 at the time, which would have made him 16).). The Indiana Jones legos were quite fun to put together, and apparently there will be a Legos Indiana Jones video game coming out in the summer. I might have to get it for the kids, since they love the Lego Star Wars ones so much (and they are pretty darn fun). Though I'm cheap and so will probably wait until it goes down to $20. The only games I pay full price for are the Grand Theft Auto games.

So I got about a page done on "The Hearts of Men." And a first happened yesterday: I got an email froma horror magazine editor asking me to send them something, even a reprint if that's all I have. It's non-paying (which I am willing to send reprints to) but I don't think I have anything that meets their guidelines so they're probably out of luck. So while I've never heard of the magazine and it's very small press (but apparently print), it's flattering to be approached like that by someone I don't know (I've been asked by at least one other editor about when I'm going to send them a story again, but that's because I've sold to them before.). Now if I could only get Ellen Datlow to send me invites to anthologies. :)

Finished the first draft of a story yesterday, which I'm intending to use for the next SSC at LH, though it still needs considerable work. Luckily I have until the middle of November to get it tidied up. I also reread my Malinche novella, in preparation of picking up where I left off with the rewrite, at least for the next two days before NaNo starts, then I'll be working on the beast every day for a month (I'm probably going to need to write on weekends too to get to 50k by the end of the month.).

In sub news, got my first personal rejection from Strange Horizons, from Jed Hartman, who actually read to the end of the story. Hurray for small milestones. I'm going to hang onto the story for a few days then send it to Abyss & Apex when they reopen on November 1st. I also got back the edit on "So Weeps the Thunder Bird" and need to read and approve it. About half my subs out right now are in red on Duotrope, though I've only sent queries to one of them. One of them I know I've been shortlisted for, another I've heard from others isn't answering queries right now so I'm not inclined to send one, and another I've been waiting over a year for though I seriously doubt that they're going to put out another issue (I plan on trunking the story so I've been lazy about withdrawing it.). A new one turned red this morning so I need to investigate recent response times to see if I need to query today or just hold off a little bit longer.  

I happened to glance at the first entry  in my submission log at Duotrope and wouldn't you know, it was on this very day 2 years ago that I sent my first submission since I got serious about this short story writing stuff. Today I sent out my 160th submission, which comes out to 80 submissions per year in that time. Back in the day, when I was of the opinion that I had plenty of time to do this kind of stuff and would rather write novels anyway, it was a good year if I sent out 4 subs. This first sub I sent was to F&SF on a novelette I threw out after only a couple rounds (because it was just plain bizarre and sick, and even now I know there's no way it would ever sell so there was no point in working on it anymore.). It hasn't felt like two years, and I'm still striving to break that 15 sub barrier that's been standing in my way for a while now. But tonight I shall drink a Pepsi in honor of this milestone and tomorrow start working on making those next 80 submissions before this time next year.