Horseshoes & Hand Grenades

September 3

I came this close.

The detailed Hugo nomination numbers have been released, and "Little Gods" made the top-15 list in the short story category -- just 4 votes shy of making the final ballot, and tied for 9th place out of 263 nominated stories. I missed making the Campbell final ballot by 7 votes (I was #8 of 93 nominees). Thanks to everyone who nominated me! Do it again next year, and tell your friends!

Ben Rosenbaum just missed making the Campbell final ballot, which is a damn shame -- if a couple more people had voted for him, he woulda been a contender.

Seeing these numbers both depresses me -- so close, yet so far! -- and delights me. After all, I'm still Campbell-eligible next year, so maybe I actually have a shot at making the final ballot! That'd be pretty cool, and would be a good excuse to go to Worldcon. I don't expect that to happen, but it no longer seems wholly impossible.

I sold a poem called "Angel Bites" to Strange Horizons, but that's all the movement on the publishing front. From a submitter's point of view, anyway -- from an editorial perspective, I've got 30 Flytrap submissions in my inbox right now that need to be answered. The ones I know I don't want will get relatively quick rejections, but the ones I think I might want are going to get held until the end of the reading period. So the longer it takes me to answer, the better your chances! I've already snapped up one piece, though, an essay that Sean Klein wrote with Flytrap in mind. He told me about it months ago, and I accepted it as soon as I read it -- it's just as good as I'd expected.

I trust that I'll see you all next year at Monkeycon, where style monkeys and genre pirates and undead genre pirate style monkeys meet, mingle, and mangle.

The writing, it goes. Slowly, but it goes. Only 700 words since the last entry, mostly because last night we went grocery shopping, and then I had to watch an X-Men cartoon, and poof! Only wrote a page. I haven't written yet tonight, however (it's only 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday as I write this), so I'm hoping to get a bit more done tonight.

Ha! Now it's 9:15 p.m., and I just wrote a thousand words on the long-neglected robot collab, and sent it back to Greg! I hope it hasn't been too long for him, that the whole thing hasn't grown cold in his mind. I actually really like the story, and would love to see it finished, because I think it could be very damn good.

Our kitten Marzipan has fleas, and he's allergic to them. Which is better than our first worry, which was that he had ringworm, which would have entailed us burning our couch and washing our bedsheets in bleach, since every stray cat hair could potentially be infected. Fleas are easier to deal with. We'll medicate the kitties, and that should be that. We hope. I've spent too much time tonight looking at pictures of feline skin diseases online. We're taking him to the vet to make sure. We could be wrong -- the fleas might not be the only problem. It's possible he has some horrid fungal or parasitic thing going on. We'll see.

I finished Pamie's book, and it's quite good, funny and moving. She's a good writer, and she's good people -- as an Oakland resident, I especially appreciate her efforts at organizing book donations for Oakland libraries. So go get her book, Why Girls Are Weird. Available from all the usual places.

Now I'm reading Skellig based on recommendations from Greg & Jenn, via Heather.

Words written since February 1, 2003: 89,200

Words written since last entry:
1,700

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