anachred

I'm down to only 2 queries out now--I need to send out some paper ones, research up a handful more names. This is boring, as updates go, but I thought it probably ought to be said. I have 5 rejections on the wall (whoa, Hanson ambush...) and one invisible one floating around somewhere.

Something new about this stage is being able to look at the manuscript and think, This is the best thing I can make it.

When I was talking with my mother the other day about the rejection stats, she began to bring up the possibility that I need to revise, tweak those first pages...
and without feeling defensive or guilty, I said:

No.
Those pages represent the book that it is. They are as good as I can get them by myself.

Both cool and scary to have brought a project to that point for the first time.



This guy is now looking at me on my desk.
Dear. You *know* you ought to be revising that last bit of the series.
Don't make me call Birch, now, hmm?


ozark_hoodlums was updated today, starting Chapter 2: Crime in a Land of Vigilantes

This is a little banner for my Etsy shop gossamersong, now boasting
7 items, from a "technicolor kittens" Umbridge skein to the Spirited
Away Haku yarn and my Very Pink tribute to the Nutcracker.

Yes, I am striving to make the shop a Guess-The-Fandom Extravanganza!
why do you ask?

(I am inordinately proud of how those three central photos go together.
I am less proud, but at least relieved to be actually working on this again.)



Speaking of work, I submitted 3 poems and a story (two for the first time)
to various places today.

I am less industriously writing a completely new scene for Carnie's Con,
in which Poisson has Molly burgle back a letter. Her only condition is to
not have to go in through a coal-hatch. (Do you know about coal hatches?)

Today I got my first "please submit more" for a story rejection. ^_^

Rejection has never made me happier. Oh, Beastly, where shall we pack you off to next?

Now to go write today's quota of words in an amazing hour and twenty minutes!

I'm starting to get to be a rejection-junkie.
Okay, so by that I mean "sending-out-poems" junkie, but that's not snappy, and a "submission junkie" sounds all sorts of wrong.

I'm sure a hit of coffee beforehand doesn't help minimize the high, either, but I think there's real fun in picking out the next magazine to inflict my poetry on, especially since I have no investment in seeing it accepted, really.
It's like picking a college, only short-term and cheaper!
Wait. None of you were college-admission-materials junkies, were you? No, that was just me...

PS: Go Read Something Good. Like The King of Attolia.

I went rifling through an old notebook (one of my hodge-podge journals where I was journalling EVERYthing together which I like to do, but is dreadful for finding stuff) and came across a Bizarre Concept.

One of those "fantasy cliche" exercises spurred it (or so I would gather from their juxtaposition on neighboring pages). It's one of the notes I was completely puzzled over until I'd puzzled it out to the end:
    A culture where the names of the gods are chosen carefully to be invoked for identities at births...but a very slight mispronounceation invokes a certain god. The children are unalterably kleptos.
    Luckily, there's a thieves colony, because it happens fairly often.

That's a fairly malleable bit. It could turn to a story where the colony emerges as an odd thievery-accomodating culture, where it begins to plot revolt, where... see?

I've started a new blog mostly for myself to practice descriptive writing by making memories into stories. I really want to learn to evoke places, times, environments. To be able to better this:
" Instead of the echoing quiet of the display hall, the rumble of motors and squeal of shop doors surrounded them. "    A gem of originality, that...

And I wrote Escape Pod because it's been 2 months since I submitted.
That makes me a bit nervous.