April Stuff

Lousy month for new writing, but an excellent month for dinking around with not-quite-there stories and getting them out the door. I always have a pile of WIPs on my hard drive; sometimes I go weeks or months without finishing anything, and sometimes I get a bunch polished up all at once. It's sort of like biorhythms that way. :) Last month I got four submissions out, which is more than I've done in one month in an amazingly long time, so that's cool.

I also got my marketing/admin doc for A Hidden Magic done and submitted, including several versions of a synopsis, at various lengths for various purposes. I'm counting that as a "synopsis" point, but I'm not counting the various bouts of sandpapering I did on the stories as "editing" because I don't know how to handle the wordcount on that. Does editing a 5500 word story equal 5500 words of editing, or does deleting 100 words equal 100 words of editing, or does dinking with a 258-word paragraph to turn it eventually into a 261-word paragraph equal three words of editing, or what...? No clue what McKoala's final verdict will be (and the Koala is absent until next week so I won't find out for a while) but I'm ignoring the whole editing thing and tentatively awarding myself five points.



I've also submitted to a couple of markets recently (Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons) where they have a form on their web site you fill out with your name, story title, cover letter info, etc., and then you upload the story right to their site, rather than e-mailing it. It feels a bit odd, but it works, so what the heck. I remember scoffing at this sort of thing a while back regarding a novel publisher's site -- brand new baby publisher, wanted you to copy/paste your whole novel into a box on their web site, and then click a button saying that by submitting you were assigning all rights to everything forever to the publisher [eyeroll] which made them sound rather... let's say "inexperienced" to be kind. I'd never heard of the "upload here" thing before with a legitimate market (and still hadn't at that point IMO) so it seemed part and parcel with the ignorance (at best) of the ridiculous rights statement. I can see this working well for shorter pieces, though (and even longer ones, to be honest, although it still feels a bit weird) and neither Clarkesworld nor Strange Horizons is going for a rights-grab, so that's fine.

On a more personal level, I tried backing off on the ibuprofen, cutting it down from 800mg twice a day to 400 twice a day. (I was originally prescribed 800 three times a day, but after a few weeks I eliminated the middle dose without much trouble.) The stuff works fairly well, but it dissolves your liver in tiny bits, and I've been taking it at this level for a couple of years now. :/ I was hoping I could get along with less, maybe taking a couple extra pills when I went to the gym or something. Unfortunately 400x2 leaves me too immobile to even consider going to the gym. I tried it for a couple of weeks to see whether it was something I could get used to, but it's not. So I'm back up to the 800x2, and the screaming in my joints is starting to quiet down a little at a time. I do need to find a doctor up here, though, and get a prescription for something else. There's got to be something I can take for the pain and stiffness that won't do a number on my liver, or anything else similar; it won't do me much good to maintain my already limited mobility if it means I need a liver transplant in five or ten years. :P

Next submission will hopefully be something for Sword and Sorceress. [crossed fingers] And if anyone else is considering that market, I found that the link I posted in the last antho call is now broken; the new page is here: Sword and Sorceress 25 guidelines.

Angie