Froth & Fragments
May 9
I'm getting rejected like it's my purpose in life, y'all; yesterday Gordon Van Gelder passed on a short-short (saying it was close-but-not-quite; it being a short-short, he just couldn't care about the characters as much as he wanted to). This morning I got rejections from Future Orbits and Flesh & Blood, the former basically a form, the latter complimenting my bizarre imagery. Sigh. This afternoon, a rejection from Gardner Dozois, calling my story "cute", but not really right for Asimov's. Fair enough, and it's my third personal rejection from him in a row, so I'm encouraged. Off they go, back into the strange wide wilderness...
To balance the bad, I got some good news today; but I'm supposed to wait until everything's official before I talk about it. Nothing major, but a pretty cool thing anyway.
***
I went to meet Heather in the Mission, where she works, last night. I'd never been to that part of the city. It doesn't smell that much like pee and crack, but I see what Heather means. We had dinner, and then went to a bookstore to see (and thus begins the obligatory linkfest) Nalo Hopkinson. On the way there we ran into Sean (who's sold a story to Talebones, which proves he's cooler than me), Ling, Avi, and Susan Yi. Cory Doctorow was also at the reading. I've been in group settings with Cory I think twice, now, and we've never really spoken; he has a kick-ass blog, though, and can write, of course, and seems quite nice, from the slight distance at which I have observed him... There were other familiar faces there, too, the people you see at readings, but I don't know their names, so... Nalo read "The Glass Bottle Trick", in her fabulous voice; it's always such a pleasure to hear her! Heather and I got hugs, and said we'd see her at Wiscon (where she's sharing Guest of Honor duties with Nina Kiriki Hoffman). I wanted to get some work done, so I dragged Heather away, and we left shortly after the reading, took the train home.
Oh, on the way to meet Heather, I wrote about 300 words on my Food story; it gets ever weirder, which is good. After we got home, I came upstairs and wrote my Rangergirl sex scene, trying not to overthink it, to just run with it; I wrote half again as fast as I usually do (I tend to cruise along at about 2000 words-per-hour), writing 1500 words in just under half an hour. I gave it to Heather to read, and she assures me that it's not bad -- needs re-writing, of course, and there's a certain hesitancy in the writing that comes from the fact that I've never tried to really write a sex scene before (always having settled for "they made love" or "they played sweet symphonies on one another's bodies" and other such clichés and abstractions when such things were necessary). But I'm pleased, and I think I at least chimed some of the emotional tones I wanted to ring out. So, 1800 words last night. Respectable, especially given all that socializing I did.
***
Oh, hey, if you haven't, go over to John's page and read his "Work in Progress" entries; they're fascinating.
***
In the afternoon I went to the Mission to have lunch with Heather, which was fun; odd, seeing her in the middle of a weekday. Afterward I wandered, ending up in Borderlands Books (which is the most welcoming of any of the SF bookstores I've been to hereabouts; the clerk was very nice, quite hands-off, and at least in terms of physical appearance he was about 85 times cooler than I am). I wanted short stories, anthologies of ripping-good stuff, you know? Ended up buying Universe 1 (from the Silverberg/Haber editorship, when they took it up after Terry Carr's death), which is crazy-good; I loved "Alimentary Tract" by Scott Baker, enjoyed the Di Fillippo story "One Night in Television City", though it was a bit too much of a mileu story to really engage me, the same way Stan Robinson's "Down and Out in the Year 2000" didn't really get a good grip on me; but Robinson's story here, "The Translator", was quite cool, and I enjoyed "The City of Ultimate Freedom" by Landis, though it was mostly mileu, too, truthfully. Lots more for me still to read. Mmm.
Also bought Silver Scream, mostly because I wanted to read Garris's "A Life in the Cinema", because I loved his story "Starfucker" from Dark Terrors 5, which features the same narrator. It was good, though "Star" is better, and there's not a lot of continuity between the stories; it's clearly the same narrator, but the huge unresolved problem at the end of "A Life in the Cinema" isn't even mentioned in "Star". But I can certainly forgive that; they're stand-alone stories, after all...
I got The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 6, too; and now my collection is complete. I have every volume of the series, albeit some in hardcover and some in trade paperback. And, more annoyingly, some of them in North Carolina and some of them are here; most of them in NC, alas. Ah, well. They'll look good all lined up on my shelf someday. And I get a free copy of the next one, being as I'm in it. Hee. This writing stuff's awesome.
I sat at a café right next to Heather's offices for an hour and a half or so, reading. It's the best café ever. It's, like, if my friends decided to make a café; all scrounged chairs, funky decorations, tons of books (I didn't peruse them, but the quality is sort of irrelevant; they make me feel instantly at home, just filling their bookshelves), and goodish cheap coffee served in the kind of cups you find at garage sales, mugs advertising obsolete tourist traps, and so on. Very cool. That, and Borderlands, makes me want to move to the Mission! Well, not really. There's all the crack. And the pee smell. And the fact that it'd be more expensive than where we live now, and grossly inconvenient for me to get into work (nearly impossible, in fact; it'd involve BART, a bus, and getting a ride up to the office. Every day. Intolerable). But I want to visit more often, at least.
***
Didn't go to work today, in case that wasn't obvious. Stomach thing; probably something I ate. Got better, though, after a morning spent in close proximity to the bathroom... Nice to have a day off, actually, since I wasn't wiped-out-ill; normally on sick days I mostly just sleep, but I've been awake, and feeling thoughtful, creative, interested, centered, good. A kind of serenity. Strange. I exist in a soup of free-floating tension sometimes... it doesn't make much sense. I get stressed out about my job, which is really only intermittently stressful, and which for the most part I greatly enjoy... I don't know. But I'm being misleading; it's not like that now. It's good. Peaceful. Heather was saying last night how good things are, how lucky we are, and I agree. We're living in mythic times; a charmed life; a charming life.
***
I'm writing a new story about monkeys and excess. It's incredibly bizarre. I hope it'll be very short; I can't sustain this level of weird for too long... did about a hundred words of it today. Whoo. But it's an opening.
***
Laundry night; not so bad. I dropped Heather off at the laundromat, then went to the grocery store for supplies & necessities. Came back in time to help with drying and folding. Had frozen pizza (well, originally frozen; we baked them before eating) for dinner, and Heather & Holly watched Strictly Ballroom, which not surprisingly bored me silly. So I came upstairs to work on mom's Mother's Day present, which is coming along nicely -- should be able to mail it to her on Saturday, so she won't get it *too* late. Then hung out with Heather a bit, until she went to sleep, and now I'm here...
And now I'm gone.
Words written since February 1, 2002: 64,650
Words written since last entry: 2K
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