I’ve eased off the past couple of days, taking a bit of a breather after the busy writing period I’ve had for the past several weeks. I finished a short story on Sunday and revised it several times in the interim. Bundled it all up and have it ready to submit next time I get to the post office. The original deadline (January 15) has been pushed back a month for reasons uncertain, but I’m glad to have my submission done and off my desk so I can think about other things.
Other than those revisions, the only new writing I’ve done in the past few days is my essay for Storytellers Unplugged essay, which will go up either at the end of the day today or first thing tomorrow morning. I went through the Gila Queen market listings that were in my INBOX this morning and found a new market for one story that’s been around the block and another possible market for a longer story. Sometimes the delay between submitting and hearing back is torture. Other times, I just send it off and forget about it, move on to something else.
The next couple of weeks will likely be a jumble of activity with brief periods of total leisure. Our daughter comes home from university this weekend, but she has other relatives to visit, so won’t be with us for the entire two week break. I’m taking days off from work when she’s home. This is her first trip back home since leaving for university in September. Gotta do some decorating this weekend. We’re always the last people on the block to put up our outdoor lights. I keep waiting for that first snowfall, but here in Southeast Texas, that could be a while…
Today is gift-exchange day at work. We have this steal-a-gift tradition where someone either has the option of opening a new gift or stealing one of the previously opened gifts from a co-worker. After refining the process, we’ve established a three-steal limit on any particular gift to keep the bottles of hootch and lotto tickets from going around and around and around again!
It was fun watching all the furor around the announcement of The Secretary of Dreams at Cemetery Dance a couple of days ago. People were refreshing their browsers like mad waiting for the big reveal, and then someone twit tried a denial-of-service attack on CD’s checkout system that brought the server to its knees for a while. The book looks terrific—check out the web site for some samples of Glenn Chadbourne’s artwork from each of the five stories he’s illustrated.
