WIP Wednesday

I actually started a story this evening, one I've been thinking about for a while. It's for the Shadows of the Emerald City antho, and if I want to submit there, I need to finish the story, edit it, polish it, and send it by Friday. I am so not going to make it.

Anyway, I had planned to write the whole thing tonight--it's going to be pretty short, hopefully around 2,000 words--but of course I had to watch four hours of Ghost Hunters instead. Hopefully tomorrow night I'll have time to finish it.

Basically that's all I've done all week except for that tiny flash story I wrote Monday. On the other hand, my mom sold her first piece of fiction today, a flash piece called "Turkey Shoot," to Ruthless Peoples Magazine. [I'd link to them too but their website seems to be down right now.--nm, they're back, and Natalie L. Sin has a story in the current issue too!] Anyway, hurray for my mom! Now I just need to badger her into writing more stories, since she has now sold 100% of the stories she's written.

Three little words

Today I had a little window of complete down-time at work, about twenty minutes where--for complicated and boring reasons--I truly had nothing more to do than sit at a desk in a quiet room, waiting for one person to finish a test.

Of course I never ever do any writing at work. But this was a unique situation, and my brain was bored. So I grabbed a few pieces of scratch paper and a pencil, and the battered old dictionary that I knew was in the drawer. And I picked three words at random.

My three words? They were awesome words, so awesome I couldn't believe my luck: equinox, purgatory, and megaphone. Fifteen minutes later I had written a fun 450-word story using all three words. I polished it a bit this evening and sent it off.

I enjoyed writing that little story so much I think I'll try the prompt again tomorrow over lunch with three new words.

Four days sort of wasted

Last week, pretty much the only writing-related thing I did was edit a story and submit it to an anthology. I'd written the story expressly for the anthology, because the theme sounded interesting. Of course that's always a mistake. I got an email from the editor an hour later, letting me know the anthology was already filled and closed. Maybe they should have posted that somewhere online, huh?

I almost retired the story right then. Instead, I tinkered with it all weekend and finally got it more or less salable to a market that isn't that particular anthology. I sent it off again tonight. Let's hope it's not as bad as I suspect.

Other than that, I did nothing during my long four-day weekend. Well, I booked hotel reservations for my DragonCon trip (no, I'm not staying in one of the con hotels--even if I could afford it, they're sold out. I'm staying in a cheapass hotel in nearby Marietta, GA). I also read two books and sent The Taste of Magic off to Ace, who will bat it back to me in a few months the way they do all my books. Oh, and I mowed the lawn. I guess that's enough for four days.

Sleep? We don't need no stinking sleep.

Last night I tried to open iTunes and got all kinds of warning messages from AVG anti-virus. So instead of watching one of my downloaded Ghost Hunters, I had the fun of cleaning up my system. Actually, since I also got a message that some files were missing and iTunes couldn't open, I suspect the issue was corrupt files and not a virus at all--AVG is bad about giving false positives. But to be on the safe side, I uninstalled iTunes, deleted it and emptied the trash, ran a full virus scan, then did a disk clean-up and defragged the computer, which was overdue anyway. Now I'm running another full scan, just in case. If it catches anything, then I'll panic. I don't know enough about computers to do any more than I already did.

I stayed up last night because I was reading a good book, Alex Bledsoe's The Sword-Edged Blonde. When the defrag finished around 12:30 am I intended to go on to bed--but I wasn't done with the book. So I stayed up until 2am to finish, and it was excellent and worth the loss of sleep. Also I don't have to work today, although I woke up naturally at eight and decided to get up.

I've been wanting to read The Sword-Edged Blonde for a while, ever since I saw some really positive reviews online. It was originally published by Night Shade Books in 2007, but Tor picked it up and republished it this summer, with a sequel coming out in September. That's as close as I'll get to reading a NSB release, since the last one I read was so full of grammar and punctuation errors, particularly homophone mistakes (including the infamous "fowl breath" episode) that I swore I'll never buy one of their books again. Copyeditors are important.

My First ARC

I have the day off work (and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow--a four-day weekend!), so I slept late and then staggered down to the post office. There I mailed my contract to Double Dragon, and picked up a package that turned out to be my proof copy of Jack of All Trades!

This weekend I'll go over it with a fine-toothed comb and send any absolutely necessary changes to my editor. At that point, hopefully it won't be too much longer before the official release! I'm thinking about running a contest to give away one of my author copies (most are already slated for reviewers or family members), so if you have any ideas for a contest, pass them along. I'm not good at contests.

Here's another picture of the inside, with one of Richard Svensson's awesome illustrations.

Just one rejection, come on

Remember Weaver's Shroud? I can't say anything really until the contract's finalized, but Double Dragon likes it. :)

One odd problem I have is with reporting an acceptance on Duotrope. I've had good luck lately with sales and my acceptance ratio is 30% at the moment. I'm afraid that if I report one more acceptance, it'll discount all my responses until I start getting rejections again.

I hasten to add that I'm not complaining about this.

Watch those names

I just read an article by Bev Vincent, a writer who happens to be a man, about his recent experiences with an editor who didn't know his gender and made assumptions due to his name. It's definitely a bit of a horror story, and fascinating too. I got it via J.M. McDermott, who tweeted the link with the notation: "Advantages to being ungendered initials?"

I agree with the initials thing--I mean, I write as K.C. Shaw, not Katherine Shaw or Kate Shaw or any other iteration of my real name--but I'm not so sure I agree with the ungendered part. Most people assume someone who goes by their initials is a guy. I have no idea why, actually. It ought to be ungendered. I chose initials mostly to obfuscate my sex, precisely because I write male characters at least as frequently as female characters, including The Weredeer books that are written first-person with a male main character.

Anyway, I do sometimes wonder how much a reader's assumption about an author's sex impacts the reading experience. I thought E. Nesbit was a man for years and years and years, and once I discovered the E. stood for Edith, I caught myself thinking that parts of her books are actually a little, you know, twee--when I hadn't thought that when I assumed E. stood for Edward or something. I also thought Robin Hobb was a man until after I'd read three of her books, but I don't recall that my perspective of her writing changed at all.

As for writers, I think we get lazy sometimes when it comes to names. It's an easy shorthand to name a ditzy character Candi--or name a cutthroat lawyer character Candi and make a dumb joke about it. Slightly more subtly, if I name one female character Terry and another Gwendolyn, it's easy to signal to the reader that Terry is a bit of a tomboy and Gwendolyn more of a girly-girl.

It goes both ways, of course.* A girl given the name Gwendolyn is more likely to grow up to be a girly-girl because that's how she's treated, while Theresa-known-as-Terry has the freedom to be a tomboy or a girly-girl as the whim takes her, since that's more what her name implies. Possibly that's why I've got two different characters named Terry and none named Gwendolyn. Possibly also that's why so many boys' names get appropriated for girls.

I'm rambling because I don't really have a point--I just like to talk about names--but this is a wake-up call not to make assumptions about someone because of their name. It's like judging a book by its cover, and of course none of us would ever do that, right?

*I'd quote from The Baby Name Wizard by Laura Wattenberg, the best baby name book I've found, except that the new and revised edition that just came out has the same freaking ISBN as the old edition, so that the new and revised edition I ordered from Amazon arrived as the old edition and I had to send it back, and the old edition I've had for years is now at a used book store, and I'm wishing I hadn't been quite so hasty.