T'was the Night Before

December 24

Xmas eve, which is nice because of all the anticipation, the pile of shiny-secret presents that will tomorrow morning be ripped all open, and all the food cooked today that will be devoured tomorrow. But I'm sleepy and sniffly and I'm having trouble even reading and I spent about an hour sitting at my computer, writing things and then deleting them or saving them to my "fragments" file and basically getting nothing useful done, fiction-wise. Then I started working on my Year-in-Review column for A Certain Magazine, concentrating on small press stuff, books not marketed as SF/Fantasy, and a little bit of poetry, because I don't want to say the same things everyone else will say, especially since the other reviewers have been doing this longer than I have, and are better at it, and so forth. So I got about 500 words written, and will keep thinking about it, trying to remember stuff I read that came out this year that moved me. It's not due until Thursday anyway...

Oh! Sold a story. "Robin of Wonderland Wood" to Ideomancer, one of my favorite online 'zines. Whee! "Robin" is my "fun with the public domain" story; the main characters are Robin Hood and the Cheshire Cat. But, oddly, it's not a silly story -- very serious. Just... strange. I feared it would be too strange to find a home, but no, it found one, and a good one, too. La. While I was updating my submission log, I noticed a couple of stories that were languishing, so I headed over to Ralan's and nosed around looking for markets, and then sent them out, poof. I only have 14 stories in circulation, now -- two of those are rewrite-requests, and I hope hope hope they sell! I have two other stories that need to be revised before I send them out. This time last year I think I had something like 30 stories in the mail -- but I sold a bunch of them! Whoo!

It's been a good year for writing, but I'll write more about that in a week or so, when I assess my progress for the past year and talk about my goals for the next year.

I love the closing of the year. The New Year has tremendous symbolic importance for me. I think about what I've done, what I want to do, where I am, where I want to be, and I begin the new year feeling optimistic and excited and focused. I know it's an arbitrary division, but that doesn't matter; it works for me.

My former girlfriend Adrienne (to whom "Annabelle's Alphabet" is dedicated) has a story online, very disturbing, quite good: "Dry Cleaning".

And that's all for now. Ho, and ho, and so on. More tomorrow, probably.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 195,300

Words written since last entry:
1,000 (including some fragments that may be usable, but not the hopeless ditherings I deleted)

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