I received my first-ever unsolicited reprint offer yesterday.  The Writer's Institute, Inc. would like to include my story "Love Spells" (originally published in Leading Edge) in a teaching anthology called Voices, which will be used as a component of one of their writing courses.  I did my homework and everything looks shiny, so here's a yay! to my fiction being used to corrupt--er, I mean, teach and inspire--beginning writers.

In other news, I'll be heading off to TNEO tomorrow morning.  Wacky road trip antics with rogue_psion will ensue. And all 07 Odfellows attending should beware, for I may just bring the chicken chucker.

In other words, I just finished the last of my TNEO crits today.  As of mid-June, I only had two left to go, but between the time spent on the previous TNEO stories and the critting I have to do for my in-person writing group every other week, I kept putting those two off because I was so darn sick of critiquing.  Every time I picked up a story, I was overcome with an insanely strong compulsion to check my email and tidy up my office files and add music to iTunes and work on my own stories and make to-do lists.

Amazingly, I didn't delve into LJ very much for diversion.  In fact, I've been a little neglectful.  I've been reading my friends list posts, but only occasionally chiming in.  So in case you've been losing sleep over it, I am still alive.  Doesn't feel like it sometimes, though.  I think I require more caffeine.

Oh, and back to the subject of critiques and writing groups and the like, a big old thank you to squirrel_monkey for her visit to our humble little Philly group last weekend.  It made for an awesomely writerly afternoon.

In other news, I am officially a Mac convert now.  My shiny new Macbook arrived last week, and I love it.  I still have a PC as my desktop (I wasn't planning to get a new laptop until my old one started crapping out on me), but when that puppy starts to die, it's getting replaced with a Mac.

I've also got my TNEO lecture all ready to go.  I think it'll be fun.  There are entirely too many awesome scenes I could use for the exercises I'll have folks doing, though, which made it hard to choose a few that would fit into the allotted time.  But choose I did.

Anyway, now that I've gotten all that down, it's back to critiquing non-TNEO stuff.  And then *gasp* doing a little of my own writing.

My laptop has gone from frustrating me with its increasingly more frequent moments of excruciating slowness (I should not be able to go upstairs and make a sandwich in less time than it takes Word to open, especially when no other programs are running) to beginning its death throes.  The infamous Blue Screen of Death even put in an appearance last week. 

Having gotten progressively disillusioned with the world of PCs, I've spent the past several months saying "I am so getting a Mac next time," and I meant it.  I was planning to get a regular old MacBook to replace my current laptop, but then I started checking out the MacBook Air, and my geeky little heart did leaps of joy.  There are many things about Air that make me happy.  It is a bit more expensive, though, and there are some downsides, like no built-in ethernet for those times when Wi-Fi isn't an option.  And there's no DVD drive for watching movies.  Granted, I can count on one hand, maybe two, the number of DVDs I've watched on my laptop in the three  years I've owned it, but when watching a DVD is what you want to do, it's nice to be able to, oh, do it.  And apparently you you need to purchase the additional physical CD/DVD drive if you want to run Windows through the Boot Camp feature, which is something I'd like to be able to do.

OK, I was going to ask for opinions or any personal experience you all might have, but after typing all that out, I think I may have successfully talked myself out of the oh-so-light-and-shiny MacBook Air and back to my original plan.

See LJ? A little bit of space, and I managed to catch up.  Now I'm just normal-busy instead of crazy-busy.

For the first day in months, I can say that, as of earlier this afternoon, I have absolutely nothing to critique.  (At least nothing with a deadline.  I can always find something to crit somewhere.)  It feels wonderful.  The round 3 TNEO stories could turn up at any moment now, perhaps even as I'm posting this, but for this brief shining moment, I am all caught up.

I finished my round 3 TNEO story ("A Song Never Tasted") a few days before deadline, which was good since it gave me time to set the story aside for a few days so that I could then tackle the info-dump weighing down my first couple of pages with fresher eyes.  It may still be a bit dumpy in spots, but it's certainly better than it was.

And I finally returned the novel revisions yesterday.  I started the revisions several months ago, but I couldn't get past the first damn paragraph, so I set it aside and focused on cranking out short stories for TNEO.  But on my train ride home from Philly last night, after several hours of nerding out with my writing group, I pulled out the novel opening, something clicked, and voila!  A beginning I can move on from.  I was quite ecstatic about that.

And I have entirely too many short stories ideas clamoring for attention right now.  I think I may have to go with the zombie story idea shvetufae and Mary gave me on Saturday. Because the zombie idea rocks, as do friends who will discuss zombies with you for hours on end.

Since ellen_denham tagged me and I actually have time to do something other than breathe and critique, my mission is to pick up any old book, go to page 123, and blog the fifth line.

*runs to bookshelf and grabs something*

Ok, I have here Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the fifth sentence on pg 123 is:

Blood was on the beak of this one and white feathers stuck to the claws of another, and no gull skimmed beyond them over the pallid sea.

Bloody seagulls.

Time to close my eyes, point my finger at my friends list, and choose my five tagging victims at random.  Ok, rcloenen_ruiz,  marshall_payne, rogue_psion, ckastens, and kristajhl, consider yourselves thusly tagged...and free to ignore said tagging. :)

Just wanted to sneak in a quick little LJ post to say that my story "A Red One Cannot See" (or, as I've more frequently referred to it, my lemur-on-a-dirigible story) was accepted for Shimmer's Clockwork Jungle Book issue.  That was a very nice email to find in my inbox this morning. Yay little lemur!

And on the subject of a red that one can see, sunburn sucks.  I got to listen to some great music at the Appel Farm Arts & Music Festival today, but it was ungodly hot, and I was sweating off the suntan lotion faster than I could re-apply it.  Damn my ghostly pale skin.

On that note, it's time to get to bed so I can rest up for another day of resisting the lure of the internet and getting some work done.  I'm about halfway through the round 2 TNEO crits and halfway through turning the crappy first draft of my round 3 TNEO story into a not-so-crappy second draft.

I was doing so well while working on my last story, but then I finished it and promptly went back to being useless in the writerly productivity department.  On the plus side, out of all the ideas and story fragments on my computer screaming "Ooo, me!  Pick me!", I had a very nice conversation with one Friday night, and I think we made a connection.  I had to reschedule our first date a few times due to those pesky real life issues getting in the way, but tonight we're going to sit down and chat over some iced lattes.  I'll hold the door and pay for the drinks; the story will provide stimulating conversation, and if I'm lucky, perhaps some inspiration for a dramatic tale of lust and bloodshed.

Speaking of tales of lust and bloodshed, according to vash137, my revision of the orgy story has officially achieved "the exact right ratio of vomiting to sex."  It is a proud day.

On another writing note, I wrote a 300-word flash story a while back which involved an anthropomorphized English language getting all battered and abused by a whiny internet user.  I sent it a few places, and while one market liked the writing and imagery, they thought the story wouldn't speak to the casual reader the same way it would to the writing community.  Point well taken, so I thought perhaps the ideal market would be one where writers are the target audience.  With that in mind, I shipped the story off to The VERB, an e-zine for writers (for the life of me, I can't remember where I stumbled across it), and yesterday got an e-mail that they'd like to buy it for their October 2008 issue.  So yay for my little writerly flash story.

And the tense-hopper is done, a whole two weeks before the next TNEO deadline.  That feels good.  I have to admit to tearing up a little while writing the ending, and then again today while editing the ending.  If I can make someone else cry with this story, I will consider my mission complete--that is, of course, as long as they are shedding "oh, that was so sad and touching" tears and not "I weep in joy because this crap is finally over" tears.

Even though it took switching everything to present tense to put an end to the brain-hurting tense hopping, I really thought I was going to end up changing this story back to past tense once I got through the first draft.  But that little bugger got really stubborn when I tried to switch it back, and I know better than to argue with a story when it sets its mind on something.  So present tense it is.

And on that note, it's time to troll my files for another story to work on.  Hmm, here's one I started in present tense...

As some folks already know from me babbling elsewhere, I queried Hub on a submission earlier this week and received a lovely reply that they'd like to publish "To Someone Who Needs Prayer."  Yay-ness!  Currently awaiting the contract and what issue it will be in, but I will be sure to shamelessly plug when the time comes.

I think the story was up to about 1,600 words when I had it critiqued at Odyssey.  A few folks suggested the story would work better as a flash piece (I believe I owe props to ericjamesstone andtodd_vandy for that, possibly others), and I had to agree.  So after making some story-level revisions, I focused on getting it down to 1,000 words, which turned out to be harder than I thought it would be.  But after many head-meets-desk moments, I did it.  Well, if you want to be really picky about things, it ended up being about 20-something words over 1,000.  Close enough for grenades and rounded-to-the-nearest-hundred submission word counts.

In the writerly progress department, things have been going well.  There have been distractions aplenty this week (like taking on layout duty for a newsletter I normally only have to do the content editing on), and this weekend will be full of musical craziness (dress rehearsal tonight, concert tomorrow night, and yet more solo and choir singing on Sunday morning), but when I have sat down to write, the productivity has been a-flowing.  I'm hoping I can finish and polish up the first draft of the short story I've been working on--the one with the unintentional and previously blogged about tense hopping, which is tentatively borrowing its title from an Emily Dickinson poem, "Nobody knows this little Rose."

I've already slacked on dedicating Tuesday nights to the novel revision, though.  A few weeks ago, I spent my Tuesday night writing time with shvetufae, vash137, and crew revising the orgy story.  The Tuesday after that, I skipped out on the journey into Philly and fiddled with the tense-hopping story, but mostly slacked since the Sinus Headache from Hell kept coming and going all night.  And this past Tuesday, I was in such a groove on the tense-hopper that I just kept going. 

So on the bad side, my dedication to novel revisions is rubbish.  On the good side, at least I'm slacking in favor of short story writing instead of DVDs and Mythbusters.

First, the obligatory plug: A Time To ... Volume 2 - The Best of The Lorelei Signal 2007, which includes my short story "Second Moon" (the artwork by Lee Kuruganti that accompanied the story's original publication also graces the anthology's cover, and I think it's darn perty), is now available for purchase through Lulu as a trade paperback or PDF download. It should also be available through Amazon and Mobipocket in the near future, so stay tuned if those are your preferred cup of purchasing tea. Because you are going to buy a copy, right? Right?

And so this blog doesn't turn into a constant barrage of me shamelessly plugging stuff, I should probably do something non-plug-like. So, um, yeah ... I don't got much right now. I haven't been particularly productive on the writing front lately, though not for lack of effort. My internal editor has been holding my brain hostage, and I haven't been able to get past the blockade she set up partway through the story I'm trying to revise. But I've got the SWAT team assembled now, and they're going in.

My flash story "Soul Delivery" is now up in the Spring 2008 issue of Flashquake. And it comes complete with a nice introductory comment from Sharon Hurlbut, who selected the story as her Editor's Pick for the issue:

"Delightful twist on the old tale of a man selling his soul to the devil. Excellent pacing and writing."

And now that I'm done with the plugging, I should get back to doing some more of that wacky writing thing.

Woke up to find a reprint acceptance in my inbox this morning, which was a nice way to start the day.  My short story "Jarra" was accepted for the July-September 2008 issue of The Lorelei Signal (my second sale to them).  The story was originally published in the now-defunct Forgotten Worlds, with whom I had a not-so-pleasant experience, so it's nice to see the story get another home.

Also got a phone call for a job interview next week, so fingers crossed for my possible return to the world of full-time employment.  I seem to manage my free time better when I have less of it, train rides into Philly are great for getting done all the reading I haven't been doing lately, and it would give me a good reason to stop over-volunteering my time elsewhere.

Debating whether I'll be joining my fellow Odfellows for TNEO this summer.  I'd really like to, but I have no idea what my work situation is going to be like by then.  Still got about a month to decide, at least.

2008 is being nice to my flash fiction so far.  I found out today that a silly little story of mine called "Soul Delivery" is going to be an Editor's Pick in the Spring 2008 issue of Flashquake, which will go online March 1.  I will be sure to shamelessly plug it some more when the time comes.

On the productivity front, I polished up my lemur-on-a-dirigible story yesterday and got it shipped off to Shimmer's Clockwork Jungle issue.  It was fun tackling steampunk for the first time, and I think the story came out with a different feel than my usual stuff, which was part of the fun.  That, and lemurs are cool, as are dirigibles.  If the story doesn't have anything else going for it, it at least has lemurs on a dirigible.

And in the non-writing world, the chorus I sing with had its annual Solo Artists Showcase concert today.  I sang a solo (a Gabriel Faure piece called "Mai") and a duet with As You Know Bob ("No One Is Alone" from Into the Woods).  I had to sing first on the program, which is always nerve-racking, but things went well overall, so yay.