Chatter.

I'm feeling chattery.

What I am not feeling is focused and chattery.

Unless you've read the first ten chapters of Thermionic Night, which you haven't, and no you're not allowed yet. Then I could chatter on about whether Eija needs to be mentioned already and Tyyne introduced or not. But I can't.

So what do you want to talk about aside from that?

I got up at 4:55. I have passed through the back-to-bed stage (WOOO!) and the bleary-eyed mumbly stage. I am now in the unnaturally-bright-eyed stage. This is the mood in which I start channeling Jordan from "Real Genius." Consider that a promise or a warning, as you like.

Usual ratio.

I often say, "I believe 'win some, lose some' is the usual ratio, and that holds here." Well. Yep.

Win some: my contacts have arrived at the optometrist's! I get them in an hour. And then I get to stop feeling like a gawky, ugly 11-year-old. (This feeling doesn't set in until I've had to wear my glasses for more than a day straight, now that I have decent glasses. But it's been a week and a half of glasses. The blue and silver Anubis's Scale* necklace I got from porphyrin on Saturday is barely holding back the tide, here. I recognize that I do not actually appear to be a gawky, ugly 11-year-old. Sometimes the things that are all in our heads are the ones that matter.)

Lose some: book rejection today. Blerrrrrrg. Nobody likes book rejections. Book rejections suck a bazillion and one times more than short story rejections. (For me. Your mileage etc.) Book form rejections? And lo, the sucking is mighty.

This was the only one of my books sitting on the desk of an editor I haven't met in person. The World Builders. The one I wrote as a YA and then squinted at sideways and decided it was really children's, because I got ideas for YA SF novels, and they looked much older than this one. Anyway, I have done nearly no research on markets between picture book and YA lengths. I have no idea what to do with this one now. I guess if I'm going to go writing middle-grade children's books (which I am; Zodiac House is also one), I'd better poke around and figure out what I can do with them when they're written.

This makes it harder for me to keep ignoring the echoing silence through the rest of my submissions log, too. But I will try to behave, that is, not to whine and fuss. Very much. After right this very minute.

Sigh.

*It's got hearts and a single feather; what else weighs such things together?