Rare Crash
March 24
Here I am again. Sorry I haven't updated in so long; been otherly occupied.
First, the word counts: On Thursday I wrote 1200 words of "Romanticore". On Friday I revised another story, making it longer by 400 words. This afternoon I wrote 6000 words of "Romanticore", and sadly I see that my original estimate regarding its length was hopelessly optimistic. I'd say it's going to be 11,000 words by the time it's finished, at least. I could slash it, sure, but not without losing a lot of what's wonderful about it, and who needs that? Besides, I sold my 12,000 word novelette, so maybe I should stop fretting about writing this long stuff. I can find homes for them, right? If they're good, and true? My favorite stories to read tend to be longer, and more complex... If I thought I was writing flabby stuff, that'd be one thing, but for the most part these stories are just long.
I've given up any hope of continuity or order in reportage; this is going to be montage. So. I read Mockingbird by Sean Stewart, moving both Powers and Kiernan to the back-burner; perhaps because their books are heavy, not to say depressing, and I needed something a little lighter. Not in terms of subject matter (Mockingbird is not a fluff book), but in terms of prose. Stewart's prose is lovely when it's not transparent, so it made for easy reading. Thought-provoking, too, and wise, and wonderful. It reminded me that it's a rare crash you can't walk away from, and that things tend to turn out well a remarkable amount of the time, and that worry never mended a fence, and that worrying about money in particular is damned demeaning. Good lessons, all, especially for me, especially right now. Susan tells me that Galveston is more ambitious, and I look forward to reading that. I have The Night Watch around here somewhere, too. Just for kicks, here's a list of the books I have lying around that I'm going to read soonish:
- The Night Watch, Sean Stewart
- A Winter Haunting, Dan Simmons
- Cosmonaut Keep, Ken MacLeod
- Miss Wyoming & Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
- The Fox Woman, Kij Johnson
- Kushiel's Dart, Jacqueline Carey
- The Death Artist, Dennis Etchison (I've dipped into this one, actually; it's short stories, quite good)
- Darwin's Radio, Greg Bear
- Various poetry books and chapbooks
I don't need to buy anything to read for a couple of weeks, anyway. Which is good.
Things have been very, very good with Heather lately. We're talking and laughing and frolicking and... it's just very good. This morning she made lattés, and fancy eggs, and biscuits, and we ate together in the sunshine, and talked about our projects, and we both noted how plain nice life was, how simply good. She's my pillar, my foundation, and my flying trapeze; she is everything wonderful and sweet.
Yesterday we went to Berkeley, and she drove around for 20 minutes looking for a parking space, and we sold some CDs to get some money to help pay for plane tickets to WisCon. If you buy a chapbook in the next several weeks, you'll be directly contributing to our Getting to WisCon Fund! Apparently putting in a PayPal button was a good idea; we got several orders the night I did that.
There are few things on this earth better than a pastrami and swiss sandwich with lots of mustard. Mmm.
I got formal acceptance for the two poems I'm selling to Strange Horizons (I mentioned the acceptance a while back, though, when the editors told me informally). Look for "Laughing Blood" and "Poor Bahamut" sometime in the foreseeable future. In related good news, Strange Horizons is now by-gosh officially a professional market by SFWA standards! That means I can join the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association any time I want (with 2 sales to SH, one to Gothic.net; my sale to Realms doesn't count until I gets my money). Do I want to join? Probably. It'd be nice to have a voice in Nebula nomination and voting (and few enough people take part that one vote really can make a difference). I'd certainly enjoy getting all the free books that come 'round Nebula time. And, while I'm not hard to get ahold of (anyone who knows my name and can use a search engine can find my contact information), it never hurts to have your name in another place (i.e., the SFWA directory). Besides, I'm in HWA & SFPA; SFWA would neatly complete the triumvirate...
Um. Lessee. Writing is going well. Work is good. House is less messy than it was a few days ago. I read most of my slush for Star*Line this weekend, though a few submissions came in today. I have a couple of stories to put in the mail, if I can manage to address envelopes tonight. For some reason I always find that difficult.
Sunday is working its usual strange magic on me. Sundays are so subjectively long for some reason; the hours just dawdle by. I used to think it was a location-specific phenomenon; of course Sundays seemed long when I lived in North Carolina. Everyone was at church all morning, everything closed early (my favorite coffee shop in N.C. closed at 3 p.m. on Sundays), there was nothing to do, the streets were deserted, there was nothing on television, etc. But Sundays are still long here in the Bay Area, where I can go to a café if I want, where there's plenty to do... it's very odd. My head is weird about Sundays.
They're closing the Mechanical Museum. Oh, they say they're just "relocating" it, but there's not going to be a new space ready for it until 2006, and the machines won't survive being moved, stored for 4 years, and moved again, so effectively, this is the end, unless the many petitions going around can save it. They're closing it to make more room for the Cliff House, which is an injustice; that lousy crackerbox doesn't need to be any bigger. Just last week I wrote a scene in the Frog story that takes place at the Musee Mecanique; it's one of my favorite places in San Francisco. I can't stand the thought that it's closing down. So go and sign a petition, hmm? Even if you've never been there, you can help it remain, so you can go there in the future.
Hey, it's Alyson Hannigan's birthday (she's 28). And, to give you a treat for her birthday, here's a link to some amazingly hot pictures of her over at For Him magazine.
Words written since February 1, 2002: 39,300
Words written since last entry: 7,600
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