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• 13:05 @sandentotten That is adorable! We'd be hosed if they had opposable thumbs. #
• 13:06 How cute are octopi, seriously? bit.ly/4GsF6V
  (look at him run!) #
• 22:17 It must be PBS's pledge week. They're airing the Leonard Cohen concert again. #betterthanANYONEliveatredrock #

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Why is it that this blog makes me want to write modern-AU "Falstaff gets a job as a mall Santa for booze/gambling debt money" fic?

(He would totally get fired within, like, 45 minutes.)

truepenny: Cats here say they are traumatized by the vacuum balrog. TRAUMATIZED.
matociquala: The Dark God Wakuum!
truepenny: Cthulhu's little known but much more dreadful younger brother.
matociquala: JUST ONE TENTACLE BUT IT REALLY SUCKS.

WHO was I talking to about sushi restaurants in the Twin Cities?

Whoever you are, the restaurant I was trying to think of is Sakura. If you still need to know. For whatever reason. Whoever you are.

Happy birthday to the fabulous coffeeem!

(Also, happy birthday to matociquala's Giant Ridiculous Dog, whom I love.)

Over in Pat Rothfuss' crazy fundraising world, the four ms Booth stories (along with many other cool things) are on the block.

Current bid is five pounds, fifty pence.

77,400 words, the end of Chapter Twenty-Four, and no ?s except as punctuation.

A little work on the start of Chapter Twenty-Five, and a number too felicitous to resist: 77,777 words.

Chapter Twenty-Four was hell on toast to write and it's probably going to need considerable shaping once the draft is done. But this is why first draft != final draft, and that's okay.

Not a very good day health-wise, so I'm pleased that I've accomplished as much as I have, even if most of it was just typing in what I wrote yesterday. We take our victories where we find them.

In other news, Elise struck like lightning from a clear blue sky, and these will soon be mine. And demanding a new dragon story as they come.

I have no idea what this story will even be like. Thus far it has offered two potential first lines:

1. Like geology, dragons happen.

2. The dragons of earth and sky are sleeping.

I don't know that either of these is right, nor do I know that either of them is wrong. They can mutter around my back brain while I write this damn novel, and maybe come springtime, the dragons and I will know each other well enough to say.

Via commodorified: I thought I was done having to be ashamed of my country, but apparently not.

Via puella_nerdii: Why I want to give Patrick Stewart a big hug:



This video contains frank talk about domestic violence and may be triggery; the same goes for the article Stewart wrote for the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, but if you are up for it, it is well worth reading.

Um, have any of you guys ever noticed this before?

( I'm sure there's a way to make this into an allegory. )

Despite the best efforts of winter, I did not have an accident today while driving first to the doctor's office to get the Mirena checked (all fine, hang in there, being the upshot) and to get my new glasses prescription. Also, because winter made me late, I got rather more done on The Goblin Emperor than I had expected. (This is why I carry a notebook with me. It saves me from doctor's-office magazines--or Nothing At All To Read which, as you know, Bob, is a fate worse than death.)

Every once in a while, I have a completely useless geek eureka! (As for example, this from several years ago: the perfect way to explain to an English-speaking audience the nature of JFK's [ETA to add: APOCRPYPHAL] Ich bin ein Berliner mistake is to have them imagine that he was speaking (in English) in Denmark and said, "I am a Danish.") Today's is that you can demonstrate the difference between "lie" and "lay" by pointing out that Bon Jovi's "Lay Your Hands on Me" is grammatically correct. All the way through.

Completely useless. Completely geeky. And there you have it.

Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border.

This is a nightmare scenario (seriously, I have refrained from pinching myself only because I know I'm awake). Please spread the word and donate if you can.

So yeah, my last final for the term was this morning. I only got 3 1/2 hours of sleep studying for it and it was at 8:30 in the morning (FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU--) but I still managed to kick the shit out of it. And now I'm free!

I don't get to go back to La Famille until tomorrow 'cause Le Boyfriend has one more final tomorrow, but FREEDOM. I bought sushi from my favorite place and also Penelope and Monsters, Inc. on a whim in celebration. I shall enjoy the hell out of sleeping in tomorrow :D

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"No enemy is worse than bad advice..." -- Sophocles

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Cheers.

LiveJournal seems to have decided that I do not need comment-notification at this time. Evidence indicates it may have decided this a while ago. I went back through the posts that seemed to have collected more comments than I remembered, and I hope I caught the important new comments--particularly, my misrepresentation of Cat Valente, for which I apologize again--but I'm now feeling a little paranoid, hence this post.

I don't answer every comment, but I do read them all--if LJ will TELL ME ABOUT THEM. Which hopefully it will begin doing again soon.

75,000 words! Only 35,000 to go, and that uneasy mutter of there sure is a lot of STUFF left to cram into this novel is getting louder.

Also today I finished the foreword for the Chinese edition of Mélusine. (Really, you should read that with a bunch of extra exclamation points: the Chinese! edition! of Mélusine! Because mere words cannot express how geeked I am about it. !!!!!) And fixed what I hope are the last few fiddly bits of "On Faith" for Shadow Unit.

Yesterday, mirrorthaw and I went to the used bookstore and bought a wodge of books. (Yes, that's the technical term.) I deduce from my haul that while I am still obsessed with the Nazis, I seem to be picking up a secondary obsession with General George Armstrong Custer. WHY I keep becoming fascinated with these people I would seriously not let in my house, I do not know. But at least I know which book General Custer belongs to, even though I don't know why it thinks I'm the person to write it.

And, since the internet, as we all know, is full of things, allow me to point you to Small Beer Press's sale, which they are holding to benefit the Franciscan Hospital for Children, where Kelly and Gavin's daughter Ursula is a patient. One dollar of every sale goes to the hospital, and if you buy the item at the full price instead of the sale price, the difference between the two prices goes to the hospital. Good sale, good cause, good books. Win!

Tomorrow, we are being promised the snowpocalypse. I plan to stay home.

I now have three virtual snowflake cookies.

Thank you, Second Anonymous Virtual Gift Giver and musicianatheart!

ETA: Four! Thank you, alice_montrose!

Oh lawd, internets, I'm too young to feel like I'm getting peptic ulcers. I spent most of yesterday finishing my Applied Kinesiology term paper (7 pages -- FUCK YEAH \o/) and freaking out about my final in the same class (from which I just got home).

Regarding said final:

1) 8:00 a.m. finals should be outlawed
2) I am really concerned about how fast it went by (we had two and a half hours -- I finished in less than one). It wasn't the kind of fast that comes from knowing precisely diddly, but...I don't know. Maybe I'm just being paranoid.
3) The only bright side I can see to this is that my hardest finals are out of the way now.

Dear God, please give me a B in Applied Kinesiology? Please? I don't give a shit what I get in my other classes, just please give me a B in Applied Kinesiology (even if I just manage to squeak by).

In the mean time, I sincerely hope the end of term madness isn't getting anyone else down too much. At least it's almost over?

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"Work is a necessary evil to be avoided..." -- Mark Twain

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Cheers.

Thank you, Anonymous Virtual Gift Giver!

1. Pursuant to this, SFWA posts the MWA's statement disqualifying Harlequin from its list of Approved Publishers. The MWA's statement makes it clear that, yes, as I suspected, Harlequin still intends to use its rejection letters to point people toward DellArte Press.

( and about those frigging cramps )

I think what the world needs now is a hot bath.

John Scalzi and Cat Valente have been talking about short fiction rates (as an outgrowth of John's muck-raking posts about a market which pays 1/5 of a cent per word*), and since my experience as a short story writer has been quite different from either John's or Cat's, I thought I'd weigh in with the view from here.

I should say three things up front:

1. I am both a novelist and a short story writer. (Whereas, in the grossly over-simplified version John is a novelist who sometimes writes short stories and Cat is a short story writer who sometimes writes novels also a novelist who writes short stories. Apologies to Cat for misrepresenting her!)

2. I am not dependent on my writing as the principal source of household income. So, I don't have to sell short stories, nor do I care very much about how much I'm paid for them. I write short stories because I love writing them; I publish them (or try to) because, well, I'm a professional writer. It's part of what that means to me as a career.

3. I do not get commissions anywhere NEAR as often as either John or Cat; my short story career has been all about submission, rejection, submission, rejection, submission, rejection. And, I should also add, I don't write to specification very well. Temperamentally, I'm much more suited to writing the story and THEN finding somewhere to send it. Even when people ask me for stories or invite me to contribute, I most often fail miserably to produce. ::looks guiltily in several directions::

My first ever sale, "Bringing Helena Back" (5,000 words) was to All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society, which pays two contributors' copies. I sold another story, "Drowning Palmer" (10,000 words) to them (and, in fact, have sold a third, although I don't know if it's ever going to get published). I submitted to them knowing that they were a non-paying market, and I did so for a couple of reasons. One is that Ellen Datlow recommended them (and later she picked "Drowning Palmer" for the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror XX, so I actually got paid for that one in the end); the other is that those two stories, being ghost stories of a very particular type, were not placing at paying markets. "Bringing Helena Back" had racked up seven rejections by then, which is not the most rejections I've ever gotten on a story, but it's certainly the rounds of the pro markets. You aim for the Moon first, but there comes a point where if you want the story to be published, you have to start aiming for the roofs. And some of those roofs are really stars, as for example:

My second sale was to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, "Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland." 5,000 words, $20. I sold two more stories to LCRW, again with the $20 flat rate. One was 1,400 words and one was 300 words. So that ranges from 0.4 cents a word to 7 cents a word. I've sold to places that paid $10 and contributors' copies, and I've sold to places that pay pro rates, but I have to tell you, most of my sales have been to semi-pro magazines for substantially less than SFWA's 5 cents a word.

Let's balance that against the other side of the ledger: the number of rejections my stories have racked up before they sold.

0 rejections: 3 stories, all three of which were pretty much deliberately pitched at the market which bought them. Two of the three were sales to Strange Horizons.
1 rejection: 5 stories
2 rejections: 4 stories
3 rejections: 1 story
4 rejections: 5 stories
5 rejections: 5 stories
6 rejections: 1 story
7 rejections: 2 stories
8 rejections: 2 stories
9 rejections: 1 story
10 rejections: 3 stories
12 rejections: 1 story
15 rejections: 1 story
17 rejections: 1 story

(That fifteen-rejection story, btw, is "Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans' Day," which is one of the two or three things I've written that I am most proud of.)

This is the part of short story publishing that neither John nor Cat addresses, because neither of them--for radically different reasons--has any particular experience with it. But I think it's a more common experience than either of theirs. You submit, you get rejected. You submit again, you get rejected. After two or three rejections, you're out of markets that pay pro rates (especially, I may add, if you are writing horror). So you move onto the semi-pros, not because you don't value your work, but because you do. Because you want to see it published, so other people can read it. It's no good sitting on a story after the pro markets have rejected it, in a sort of You'll all be sorry when I'm dead! spirit.

"Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland," that story that got 0.4 cents a word from LCRW, is my only award-winning story. It is also my most reprinted story, and was my first story to be translated. "Drowning Palmer," which I did not get paid a cent for, made the last Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and you BET I'm proud of that. Most of the Booth stories went for semi-pro rates or less, and yet The Bone Key is quite possibly my most successful book and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.

Now, I'm not saying that John is wrong in asserting that writers should value their work and should only submit to markets that also value their work. Because I think he's right. But I don't think that Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, paying a flat $20 for stories in LCRW, don't value my work. In fact, I'm pretty damn sure they do.

It's a balancing act. If you're too picky as a fledgling short story writer, you won't get published. You will simply drown in the slush. But if you're not picky enough--there are some sales I wouldn't make now, because I'm older and wiser, but the only one I really regret is to Naked Snake Online, which not only offered $5 for a 10,000 word story (0.05 cents a word, that), but then never paid me the $5.

But there's a difference between markets that don't pay well (or at all) and markets that are trying to exploit writers. That's the difference you need to learn to see, and it isn't necessarily blazoned forth in the pay rate. All Hallows may not pay, but they love ghost stories as much as I do.

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*ETA: I am not in any way, shape, or form arguing with John's denunciation of Black Matrix.

CAVEATS--PLEASE READ

1. This is going to be TMI for a lot of people, of both the XX and the XY persuasion. If you don't want to read about menstruation, DO NOT CLICK.

2. THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT BIRTH CONTROL. My birth control decisions are none of your business, unless you are mirrorthaw. If you are, you already know more about this issue than you want to; if you aren't, rest assured that I have made careful, responsible, and informed decisions about same, none of which are (a.) under discussion in this post or (b.) up for discussion with the internet at any time.

3. My situation is complicated by a number of chronic health problems and consequent medications, which are also not under discussion in this post. So if you're about to comment with, "Why don't you do [X]?" please consider the possibility that I have good reasons.

4. I understand the urge to give advice. I succumb to it myself from time to time. However, I am not at this time asking for advice, and unless you are a medical professional familiar with my medical history, I am very unlikely to take your advice should you offer it. I may not be particularly gracious about it, either.

I am making this post because, well, it's the internet. Venting is what it's for. And also for the purpose of, you know, talking about this stuff. Because I still think it's STUPID that anything as painful and annoying as menstrual cramps should be considered normal and just something women have to deal with.

Okay? Okay.

( my ongoing saga, let me show you it )

She asked for help with the shoe shopping, and it's hard to resist. I found some stuff for myself.


GREEN SPECTATORS! I need these so much!


Cute heel, subdued color, fun lace-up part.


These are cheap, so they'd probably kill my feet, but I can't resist the idea of wearing these with every fun vintage dress I own.


I love color! Can't help myself.


These would get worn all winter long. I wear flats every day and save the heels for dressing up/going out.

What clothing/accessory item are you currently lusting after?

Here is the main post for Pat Rothfuss' Worldbuilders auction/raffle/thingy for Heifer International. (No, before you ask, I don't know which section he's planning to put my books in. We'll all have to wait and see.)

If you want to participate, in any of the possible ways, please make Pat's life easier and, as he asks, read the instructions carefully before you make your donation.

71,500 words. Twenty-three chapters complete, without any ?s left in them except as punctuation. WIKTORY!

Now I am going to go exercise. mirrorthaw bought me the EA Sports Active--for those who are interested, I like it much better than the Wii Fit. It's more flexible, more responsive, and it provides a much more balanced workout. Also, it does not NAG me.

Meanwhile, Pandora is providing Cab Calloway. There was Mississippi John Hurt earlier. Life is not too shabby.

Internets, it's snowing outside right now. Like...heavily so (alright, it's not sticking because the concrete didn't freeze enough, but still -- FLAKES). And it's s'posed to again (even more so) on Friday. Did I mention that I officially love winter?

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"Sanity is a cozy lie..." -- Susan Sontag

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Cheers.

Happy birthday, papersky!

71,000 words! Only 39,000 to go, and we're starting to reach the tipping point where instead of thinking, oh my god it's like building the Great Wall of China with a spoon, I start thinking uneasily, There sure is a lot of STUFF left to cram into this book. This is a good sign.

Lost a big chunk of the day to the ophthalmologist--they always dilate my eyes, so that's an hour and a half actually in the doctor's office* and then another three or four hours afterwards where I'm as useful as a screen door on a submarine--so those approximately 2,000 words of progress are particularly gratifying.

Heard a thing on NPR this afternoon about the first Jamaican dog musher, Newton Marshall; he's already completed the Yukon Quest and is training for the Iditarod. This is a completely awesome kind of craziness, and I salute him for it.

And I am taking my tired and much abusèd eyes to bed.

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*My favorite comment from today: "Your nerves look great."

My flist has been doing this, and I feel that I could use some love.

THE FANFICTION LOVE MEME