Week of March 28-April 3

Writing done:
--3K of Not The Moose (harumph)
--picking at other things, as usual
--working on @#&$ synopses/query letters/etc.
--finished "The Beast's Apprentice," which turned out to be a novelette. Oops. I hate marketing novelettes. There is no advantage to a novelette, except that it pays more than a short story if you can sell it to the smaller pool of markets. Bah. Also, I don't like writing them as well as I like writing either short stories or novels. But this one was all right at this point.

I can tell I'm much less broken of brain than I was in October, because the scenes that were impossible then just flew off my fingers this week. No more staring at "The Beast's Apprentice" mournfully, or balefully, or any other -fully. And now it's one less thing to think of.

Frankly, I need one less thing to think of this week. I have pre-MiniCon jitters/introverted reaction something awful, exacerbated by the fact that I seem to have agreed to be on a panel (though I haven't heard from the person I e-mailed, so maybe they won't expect me to actually do it). And we're going straight from that into a brief visit from some very welcome college friends and their little one, whom we have not yet met.

I'm reminding myself that the sane reaction to this is not to crank out as many words per day as humanly possible tomorrow through Thursday, as showing up at the con with a twisted hunch in my back and falling over snoring during the first panel is unlikely to make a good impression with anyone. Any of you who feel like e-mailing me a reminder to relax and calm down round about Tuesday will have my gratitude. I'm sure I'll enjoy this con thing once I get there. It's just that this is a new flavor of con for me, and it features very many cool people, and very many people in general, and I'm spooked.

A good reminder

I forgot to give my rejection/acceptance tallies for the week. It's just as well that the thing that reminded me was a semipro acceptance: Kenoma wants "Take Back the Night." Hooray for girly Berkeley Tam Lins! (Tams Lin?)

Rejections numbering three and a half: that is, three actual rejections, one message board notice that all Argosy subs from before February have been read and should be presumed rejected if not otherwise known. Since I submitted in January, that means me. (I hope they eventually send an actual rejection, though; not everyone reads message boards or has friends who do.) Two of them were from last week's subs, so hurray for F&SF and Alchemy's fast response times as usual. They've become my first two fantasy market submissions for that reason.

If this continues, I'm going to have to start calling myself a fantasy writer and just leave the "SF and" off entirely. But I don't think it will; I think I'll polish off "Docile Bodies" one of these first weeks and have something else to ship around to SF markets. Which will be in some ways a relief. I don't want to let go of that part of myself entirely.