Haphazard Me

April 5

I woke at 6 a.m. For the second day in a row, I woke from dreams of good things happening, of winning awards, selling stories. Had a brief let-down when I realized those were only dreams. Then had the small thrill I always have in the very early morning when I realize it's Saturday, and I can roll over and go back to sleep, if I like, or go out and have breakfast, or anything at all that I want. If I can ever write full-time, I think I'll miss that joy of not-working. Some say there's no pleasure like the absence of pain immediately following pain...

In the news, I didn't make the Stoker final ballot, which in a way is good, because now I don't have to scramble to find the money to go to the Stoker weekend, though I would've been given the opportunity to raid Nick's fridge if I had gone, so in a way it's too bad.

Then Greg made a declaration and possibly went insane.

And here, via Gabe, an interview with K.J. Bishop, whose brilliant first novel The Etched City I reviewed for the April ish of A Certain Magazine.

I'm reading the new issue of Asimov's. Ratbastard Barth Anderson continues his climb to the ranks of my favorite short story writers with "The Apocalypse According to Olaf", which is just so damned good it makes me ache, a little, with the details, the observations, the character, the weirdness of the fantasy elements... good stuff.

[Jeezus pleasus, it's 7:05 a.m., and I've just paid all my bills for the month. And I haven't even had coffee yet, because grinding the beans would wake Heather up! Maybe I should go out for coffee. It looks like a beautiful day out there... Nah. Going out's too much trouble this early, especially since we're going to Berkeley later, most likely.]

Okay. Let me mentally organize. Okay. So, writing news, you guys are always interested in that stuff, right? Right. Got my contract from Realms for "Romanticore", whoo! They're paying me a slightly lower per-word rate than last time, I assume because the story is almost 4,000 words longer than their "hard but permeable" word limit, but even so, they're paying me the equivalent of two week's day-job pay (net, not gross). That's, like, a goodly portion of a used car, you know? Or something equally spendworthy. Or maybe I'll just get to have a savings account for a little while. I've been writing a good bit lately, though not with laser-beam-like intensity, rather working on various things. Heather and I started a collaboration set in Oakland, which (if we finish it) we'll send to Mike's anthology. It's a good story so far, and it even required a field trip to scout a location! Exciting. So I did 800 words on that, and I've done 1700 words on the Frog novel since last I wrote. Not quite the thousand words a day I'd hoped to produce -- one morning I only managed to write a single sentence, which, the next day, I deleted -- but it's moving along, and it's a strong novel, I think, certainly the most solidly structured of any novel I've tried to write, with multiple plot threads weaving assuredly together, small things that happen early on snowballing into major plot points in a way I hope will be satisfying. Of course, I've got another 90,000 words or so in which it could all fall apart...

I finished The Impossible Bird, and liked it; there was some interesting, unusual stuff there. But, as I told Heather, "My book's got hummingbirds and poison frogs, so it's better." I mean, damn. That's just simple arithmetic.

Now I'm back to reading A Choir of Ill Children (love that Piccirilli) and M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen. I'd been under the impression that I'd never read any Harrison, but actually several of the stories are familiar and fondly remembered from the reading of my youth, when I seldom paid attention to things like author's names.

In terms of mundanities, there have been many lately. Being sick on Tuesday. Last night we did laundry, and wound up eating dinner by foraging at the 7-11 adjacent to the laundromat (ooh, I still have cheetos left from that! Score! Breakfast!). Work is gearing up into stressful-mode again as we try to finish the May issue before the Nebulas, since half the staff is attending that. Heather and I are helping out with the Nebula weekend by organizing a reading of selections from Le Guin's Always Coming Home (so if you know anyone who's attending the weekend, and is free Friday afternoon/early evening, and wants to read some Le Guin, let us know). Today or tomorrow we have to mow the lawn, because the landlady is getting cranky about the knee-high weeds. I should make sure all my short-story submissions are up-to-date, which they probably aren't, because, hey, I'm haphazard me.

That's it for now. More later, probably.

Words written since February 1, 2003: 28,300

Words written since last entry:
2,500

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