Me no scary

Okay, I tried, I really did. I wanted to write a blood-drenched, haunted, freakish story to send to the Shadows of the Emerald City antho. It was called "Hunger" and starred the Hungry Tiger.

But I couldn't do it. I don't know how to write a scary story. I had to drag in bad guys--nomes, from several of the Oz books--to even bring myself to write about the Hungry Tiger attacking anyone, and then once the nomes had kidnapped Dorothy (and Billina the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion), the Hungry Tiger and Toto decided to rescue them. I did not actually mean for this to happen. The Hungry Tiger was supposed to be killing and eating everyone!

Obviously, I'm no horror writer. I'm happy writing fantasy. I've deleted my wretched attempt at "Hunger" and feel much better. Besides, I wasn't going to be able to finish before midnight anyway.

300 words and not sure it's worth it

I'm a mere 300 words into "Hunger," which has to be finished and submitted by tomorrow night's Shadows of the Emerald City deadline; if I don't finish in time, there's no point in finishing at all since there is no other market for this story. I feel like I'm an Iron Chef challenger and the last five minutes have been announced, and none of my dishes are plated yet.

I was going to do the random picture meme that some folks have been doing, but I realized almost all of the pictures I have saved to my harddrive are lolcats. So instead, I'm going to go work on "Hunger" and leave you with this single random picture.

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.