If all this rain were snow…

…we’d be up to our noses in white stuff by now. It’s dark out and has been raining steadily for the past hour or two.

I got four short stories into circulation over the past few days. One of them is going out to see the world for the very first time. I wrote it originally for the Wee Small Hours contest at Hellnotes and realized that it was a reasonably good fit for a themed anthology I read about. I spent some time with it yesterday and boosted the original 900 words up to about 1300, then sent it off.

I’m re-reading Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun & Profit a bit at a time and came across a passage about handling rejection. He advocates having as many stories in circulation as possible so that you are regularly getting one back and you become used to rejection as part and parcel of the business. I currently have 19 stories out, and there’s rarely a week goes by that I don’t hear about one of them, usually a rejection. Not always, but more often than not. Block also advocates getting a story back out the door within 24 hours so you won’t be tempted to reread it. If you thought it was good enough to submit the first time, it’s still good enough, probably. If it’s been out for a year, you might grant yourself permission to reread it and reassess it, but otherwise, print out a fresh copy and get it off to a new market ASAP. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for the past year or so and it works well for me.

My short story “In a Country Churchyard” will be the featured tale at Horror World during the month of January. Check it out in a week or so—there’s no admission charge. Chris de Burgh fans may recognize the title as the name of one of his early songs, but the resemblance ends there. The bare bones of the story (pun semi-intended) were first written back in the 1980s but it has been extensively updated for this appearance.

I watched the first six episodes of LOST Season 3 over the past couple of days. Two of them had commentary tracks, so I listened to those and turned on captioning so I could get the dialog from the episode at the same time. Worked fairly well, except every now and then I’d focus on one input stream and realize that I’d been concentrating so hard that I missed the other, so I’d have to rewind. Only four more weeks until Season 4 begins. Can’t wait! Jericho is also supposed to be back in early February. Finally, something to watch on the tube.

So, Amazing Race fans. Would you have agreed to get “f f” tattooed on your bicep to complete a fast forward? If you win the $1 million, you could always pay to have it erased, but if you don’t win, maybe you’ll be stuck with it. Getting your head shaved, as Joyce and Uchina did a while back, is drastic but temporary. This one’s for life. I think it would have been a tough call for me.