February Stuff

I've been on the Oregon coast for the last week and a half, doing two workshops back-to-back. It was a grueling experience, as the single workshop I did last year was. And it was awesome, and I'll definitely be doing it again. I got lots of writing done, and I SOLD A STORY!! Which got the all-caps treatment because it's my first professional sale, as in more than five cents per word, holy freaking yay!!! :D

I'm going to have a story in Fiction River's anthology How to Save the World, edited by John Helfers. (Scroll down a bit -- it's the second book.) Holy sheep, I'm gonna be in a book with David Gerrold!

I've been trying to break into mainstream SF/F for ages, so this is a huge deal for me. I'm still getting this really silly grin on my face whenever I think about it, so I beg pardon of anyone who sees me and thinks o_O about my state of mind. :)

I wrote almost 29K words in February, which is good -- I'm still well ahead of quota for making my 2013 goal. My wordcount meter says I'm at 27%, so I'm where I was hoping to be at about a week into April. That's great; I love having padding on my quota. I was hoping for more in February (January was over 35K) but there were several days when I was in the workshop and frantically reading rather than writing. I count those days well spent, though. I also killed my streak, but I was anticipating that, too. No prob; doing an Oregon workshop is one of the better reasons I can think of for having days with no actual writing.

The workshops I did were The Business and Craft of Short Fiction, and the Anthology Workshop. The Antho Workshop is a repeat for me; it's worth doing over and over, and many writers do. I took a ton of notes, especially at the first one, and learned a lot of stuff I didn't know before, which is the point. (Wow, a story that's in a continually extended option with Hollywood can make you a buttload of money, even if they never make the movie!) Great info; it's going to take a while to absorb it all.

Currently I'm sitting in a hotel room in Portland; I have a flight home at 2:30. I'll do some writing today, then fall into bed (ten hours last night, still not caught up) and my next Thing To Go To is a dentist's appointment on Thursday.

Oh, yeah, didn't blog about that before. :/ So on Wednesday two weeks ago, Jim and I were having dinner at this little cafe across the street. They have these really good ice cream sandwiches -- two chocolate chip cookies, made in-house, with in-house ice cream in the middle, then freeze the whole thing. So I was eating my ice cream sandwich when one of my crowns (upper incisor) snapped off at the gum line. :( Luckily I had a root canal before they put the crown on, so it didn't hurt; I was just damn startled, and then all ACK!! when I realized what'd happened. And that I was getting on a plane Saturday morning to go to the workshops. [headdesk]

I went to my dentist the next morning and they put in a very fragile, non-functional, temporary tooth-like object, cemented to the teeth to either side on the back. I was warned not to bite anything, and not even to brush. And when your dentist tells you not to brush, you know your fragile dental work is FRAGILE. I was very careful, but it was a bit wiggly within about 24 hours. I had some vague hope that it'd last at least until the second workshop, but no luck; it came out just a bit over three days after having been installed. So I've been going just over a week now with this huge gap in my front teeth, and talking a little funny.

I feel like I'm seven again. :P

Anyway, this is fixable, although it's going to be expensive. Civil Service has notoriously lousy dental insurance, and the Pacific Northwest has notoriously expensive dental care, for whatever reason. So the bill for an implant is going to be very large, and our insurance isn't picking up a dollar of it. This is our tentatively planned cruise for this year, going into my mouth.

I just hope my other crowns last longer. At least I know to stay away from the Market Cafe's ice cream sandwiches; that was the most expensive dessert I've ever eaten, by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Angie