One of those weekends. We had to get up before 4 a.m. Saturday to take our daughter to the airport to return to university. I’m not the sort to go back to bed after being up and about for a while, so that was the start of the day. I had to take my car in for service at 9:00 and by the time I left the dealership to drive home, it felt like I’d been up all day. Or that the trip to the airport had been the day before. Or something. My only major accomplishment for the day was to finish Soul Kitchen by Poppy Z. Brite, another solid entry in her “Liquor” series. There was one tragic event in the book that took me so much by surprise that I think I gasped or moaned or something. Books usually don’t deliver that immediate sort of punch to the stomach surprise for me.
I spent the rest of the day in a bit of a daze. I did a little filing, paper and electronic, but spent the rest of the day re-watching Firefly episodes. Five in total, I think.
Yesterday was more productive. I caught up on some correspondence that had been hanging for several days. I hate having unanswered e-mails in my INBOX, so as a result, I’m usually a pretty quick replier. It was bugging me that I had two messages that I’d not responded to since mid-week. I also finished up some paperwork that had been lurking on my desk for a few weeks. Primary among them was a grant application. I’ve never applied for a writing grant before, but I thought *shrug* why not? This one has about a 20% success rate (applicants awarded grants) and it’s a nice little sum of money, so it was worth the time it took to fill out the paperwork. I don’t have high hopes, but you just never know. It could take four or five months to find out one way or the other, so that’s something I can file away to the back of my mind and move on to other things.
I need to get caught up on my submissions. I think I have a few stories that are in limbo. Back from one editor but ready to go to another if I can find a suitable market. I also have a stack of submission guidelines on my desk, some of which attracted my attention. For at least one, I know I missed the boat as I read somewhere that the anthology was declared full and closed, so I can file that one in the trash. I have the urge to write a short story to cleanse my pallet before returning to the novel-that-seems-to-be-perpetually-in-progress. An opening rattled around in my head whilst in the shower this morning, but I don’t know if that will go anywhere as it uses material that I’ve been planning to reserve for a future novel, but maybe this is where it belongs instead.
My agent is on vacation this week, but he took the Missing Persons manuscript with him and hopes to respond to the new draft when he gets back. He also has the first 75 pages of the above-mentioned in-progress work, but he said he wouldn’t respond to that until after we got Missing Persons back into the submission pool again.