Week of April 3-9

[mrissa]

No nothing in the mail. Nof-fing, as we always used to say. It's the beginning of the month, more or less, so I've gone through and marked which submissions have been out forever and which maybe need a query. I hate querying. "Ummm...so...d'you have a story of mine? And are you gonna read it? Maybe?" It actually does some good once in a blue moon, when it's a market I reasonably trust and something has slipped through the cracks, and then they're the embarrassed ones instead of me, and I feel like I can submit to them again no problem. Mostly it's just no good for anybody, though. I also have given up entirely on a few markets and will have to ship those stories back out somewhere else, if they haven't already been everywhere I'm still willing to send them.

(Market grump omitted here. I just want credit for omitting it.)

markgritter has thrown himself on the unexploded bars to make sure they're not substandard for our company tonight. He is a Hero of the Revolution once again.

The Council of Alphas, as one of my friends in California is calling my alpha readers, are wonderful, wonderful people (and, as I assured said friend, I'm sure they hold all you sub-omegaloids in the highest regard). (Simpsons moment. Never mind.) They are reassuring me that Thermionic Night is not, in fact, the new Eye of Argon, and they're reassuring me that they will have Things To Say. This is the most superior situation possible. If they weren't liking the book at all, that would suck in some very obvious ways. But if they weren't spotting anything in it that they'd like to see fixed, I know it's not perfect, and I'd have to find all the dreadful stuff all by myself before passing it on to the beta readers. And clearly that would suck, too.

Writing novels. It's exactly like being an Olympic gymnast, except that you're allowed to have your friends working a crane to haul your ass over that vault at the crucial moment. Also not so many ripped calluses, so that's all to the good.

Comments

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I think it's a comic strip reference originally. Basically characters who never actually do anything (except, I suppose, declaim).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It means that the characters are not being put into really any setting or context. You don't have a feel for whether they're talking in a crowded bar, a stuck elevator, a farmyard, whatever. It's just two heads talking to each other.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Also unlike Olympic gymnasts, novelists generally aren't past their peak in their mid-20s.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And we're allowed to weigh more than eighty pounds, yes, and if Bela Karolyi doesn't keep his mouth shut we can have him removed from the arena of competition.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

But during the tough revision stage, it might help to have him there saying [accent] "You can do it!" [/accent]. (Except Bela probably never [/accent]'s).