Swimming Back with an Acceptance Letter

Aeon just let me know they're buying "Swimming Back from Hell by Moonlight." Yaaaaay! Maybe we're not supposed to play favorites, but I can come right out and say I think this is one of my best. It's got girl-Orpheus, who is a picture book illustrator, and hell is in fact full of mice. And I wrote it partly for cristalia and partly for Andrew, and I like it when stories that are for people don't turn out too narrow to be for anyone else. (Although I think the ways in which it's for Leah are a great deal more sidelong than that.)

You know what this means, of course: I have sold more stories than I've written this year. Again. So I have to write another story. Wailie woe etc.

Things I Need to Figure Out (Preferably Soon)

1. How to throw in lines of operetta without boring or appalling the readers.

2. How to keep from panicking at the smaller-than-peak but still utterly reasonable number of short stories I have in circulation.

3. What I am doing for Christmas baking, other than the obvious things. (Pepparkakor, fudge meringues in both raspberry and pistachio, gingerbread of the loaf variety, apple bread with toasted hazelnuts, layered fudge. Those are the obvious things. What else?)

4. What to bring to Thanksgiving dinner. (This problem is subtitled, "Can you teach a 95-year-old great-aunt new greens?" I suspect in this case the answer is yes. Your auntage may vary.)

5. How to send someone else grocery shopping and still end up with enough groceries to feed us actual meals.

6. What to read for ten minutes in the group reading at Fantasy Matters on Friday.

7. What to get a favored small person for his birthday. (Hint: not a rocket cake. Because ladysea is already making that. I had this explained to me very carefully more than once by the said small person.)

8. What to wear for Fantasy Matters that will also be appropriate for a concert that night, where by "appropriate" I mean "will not kill my feet, freeze my butt, or require timprov to look unduly menacing."

9. When I can wedge in additional lunch, dinner, tea, or general hanging-out with people I like but don't see enough of (that is to say, all the people I like, individually or in very small groups), and how I can do it without going into an introvert coma and hiding under my desk until Lucia Day.

10. What is wrong with the bathroom and who should fix it (who as in which professional, not which housemammal).

11. How on earth it can only be Tuesday, and, simultaneously, how on earth it can be mid-November already.

12. What novel to write next.