Good Company
August 16
Hello all.
Two things are available now -- The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror XV and Dark Illuminati #0. Ordering info is in Current Publications. I got my contributor's copy of the Year's Best yesterday evening. Mmm. Yum. I ran around the house, clutching the book to my chest, hooting with glee. So nice. (And thanks to Greg for saying nice things about the story.) Still waiting for my copy of Dark Illuminati, but, woo hoo! What good company I'm in!
Jeni Olin is a poet who went to the same college that I did, though I've never met her; she graduated a year before I arrived. I was, in many ways, the darling of the poetry profs in college, but I always felt I lived somewhat in Jeni's shadow -- I heard often how amazing she was as a writer, and how she had outrageous adventures and put them into her writing, and she's always sort of fascinated me from afar. My old poetry prof wrote me a few days ago and directed me to some of her poems online -- several are here. Good stuff. Makes me want to get my mainstream poetry mojo on; most of what I write these days is speculative poetry, and even then, it's usually just when someone asks for something. I should write more poems...
Let's see, it's been a lot of days since I last posted. I've written probably about a thousand words since then, most of that tonight. Not a very writerish week, alas. This weekend will be better, I think. Tomorrow Heather's going with some friends to see Blue Crush, which I'm not much interested in, so in theory I'll write the afternoon away. Sunday we're having lunch with a dear friend, Sharon, who was my first English professor in college, and is one of my favorite people in the world. She just got married, and is honeymooning in California. Should be super fun seeing her, and meeting her husband.
The week was odd. Quite busy at work, some of the time -- but the September issue is done, la, and will be out in time for Worldcon. I wish I could say I'd been relaxing since we finished that on Wednesday, but the next two days were spent catching up on everything I couldn't work on while I was working on the issue. Home life is mostly a blur in my memory -- reading, Diablo II, etc -- except for the good meals, the salmon on Monday and the really amazingly good bruschetta we made Tuesday with fresh basil and tomatoes from the garden. Thursday was dinner with the lovely Susan Marie, which was fabulous, good beer, good food, great talk.
I am so going to see Wil Wheaton put a hurt on Barney the dinosaur at the EFF bash. Going to work the next day will hurt, but the total exhaustion will be worth it, I think. How often does one get to experience such surrealism? And, as they say, it's for a good cause.
I found out today that I've got two weeks of paid vacation coming to me, having been at my job a year. Whee! For some reason, I thought it was only one week. This is so, so much vacation time. Wow. Heather and I are going to do a long weekend trip sometime this fall, but that'll still leave me with a week. What will I do with that week? I will write like a mad thing. Just need to figure out when I want to do it... Maybe after Rangergirl's done, so I can just totally crank away on short stories, maybe write that novella I've been putting off writing (because where do I sell something that'll probly run to 30,000 words?). Though I may just use the time to revise the holy hell out of Rangergirl. It's funny, I'm totally in the home stretch on the book, and I'm starting to see the scenes that are missing, the gaps in the structure, and figuring out how to write them; it's an effort not to write those interstital scenes yet. I want to get the draft finished first, you know?
That's all, I think; all I can get my brain to agree to do just now, anyway.
Words written since February 1, 2002: 135,250
Words written since last entry: 'bout a thousand.
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