If you saw my post yesterday, I included a picture of tropical storm Humberto parked about 50 miles off the shore from Galveston. It had Houston in its sights and we were expecting a ton-o-rain today. Humberto did two unexpected things overnight. First, it became a hurricane, which none of the forecasters predicted. Then it zagged east and missed us completely. We haven’t had a drop of rain and the sun is shining. The folks in Beaumont didn’t get off so lucky. It was astonishing how quickly this thing developed and how unpredictable it was.
I did a hardcopy editing pass on Adrift last night. My editing style is a lot different when I work from the manuscript than when I edit on the computer. They’re complementary approaches, and I always do both before I consider a story revised. This morning I keyed in my edits and did a little more revising. I will print it out again and do a readthrough, this time looking primarily for typos that I introduced this morning. I almost always delete a word too many here or not enough there.
As I mentioned yesterday, the story I’m considering submitting to a newly announced anthology is sitting with another market. I received an update from the magazine editor this morning saying that the story is with one of his readers and I should hear back “soon.” The deadline for submissions for the anthology is about two weeks off, so I guess I’ll be patient and not withdraw the story unless I don’t hear back by a day or so before deadline. I’m not sure I have enough time or inspiration to write something new for this antho market. The worst case scenario, though, would be to withdraw it from its current limbo and then have it rejected by the anthology. That would suck. Still, I want to play fair with everyone and not sim-sub to the antho pending the response from the magazine. Where’s that crystal ball?
