Things I Need to Figure Out (Preferably Soon)

[mrissa]

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.

Comments

[sethb.livejournal.com]

#2: You have fewer stories in circulation because you've sold more of them. That can't be a bad thing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Because I've sold more of them and because I'm writing fewer in a given year. And the latter part isn't a bad thing, either, because I'm liking a much higher percentage of the ones I write, and because I wasn't really all that pleased with writing twice as many in a year. (Various factors there.)

But there is a down side, even though the whole is a good thing. The way I manage dealing with rejection is that there are always several other things out there in circulation, so if any one thing gets rejected, it's one out of a large-ish crowd. (When I started submitting stories seriously, I didn't prepare one for submission. I prepared three.) Also I deal with it by viewing short story submissions as a dose of hope: on any day, any day at all, something good could happen, in that I could sell a short story. So I need to adjust my brain to dealing with a smaller level of cushioning and a smaller dose of hope. I think adjusting the brain is the right answer -- trying to get back into a short story writing frenzy with mixed quality of results (or with consistent results neglecting novels and other stuff in my life) is not the answer. But it is a change I need to perform on my outlook.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

You are writing the correct number of stories for you to write.

The fewer that have not yet been accepted, the better.