I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here yet. I will be attending Wiscon this year. At least a few of the days. I’m flying into Madison on Saturday morning and flying out on Tuesday evening. It was the easiest way to handle it in regards to cost and taking time off. And this way I still get to see all the wonderful people who will be there.

In addition to Wiscon, it looks like this will be my year of cons. So far, it looks like I will be attending Readercon and World Fantasy and I may make it up to Worldcon in Montreal as well.

Hopefully, at some point, I’ll have something to “promote”.

I neglected to mention this before, but a little while ago a wrote a short “prose poem” specifically for Jetse de Vries’ Twitter project, Outshine. Apparently he liked it, because he offered me money for it. It’s only 14 words, but with the payment that comes out to more than 35 cents per word and that’s the highest I’m likely to ever be paid for a piece of short fiction.

I’m not sure when it will appear, but I will link to it when it does.

I find the whole concept of Twitter “fiction” fascinating, as well as other nano-forms, and I like what Jetse’s been doing.

I may have to put something together for his Shine anthology, too, now…

Years ago, when I was first attempting to be a serious writer, I read a lot about writing, from other writers, from editors, from anyone I could find. I knew I wanted to improve and didn’t know how and so I tried to take as much in as I could.

One of the pieces of advice I received at the time, from several sources, was the idea that every word should count. To paraphrase one writer, you should hold a gun to the head of every word and see if you need it or not.

At the time, this seemed an impossible task. How could you, the me of the time would think, examine every single word and assess its worth? I could only see a story on a sentence level, not on a word level and I just chalked it up to the way my brain worked.

Yet know, years later, with more experience under my belt and, hopefully, a better perspective, I now understand what that means. I now know the effectiveness, even the joy, of going through a story and cutting a word here, a word there, of breaking a sentence down to its essentials and making it say what you really want it to say. I only realized that, however, today. And it feels like an accomplishment. It feels like I made the next waypoint and that I have traveled a bit further down the road.

Better still, I didn’t have to work at it, at least not at that specifically. I worked at writing better, certainly, but that ability and that awareness arose out of the process organically. As I said, I think it’s a matter of perspective.

I guess I’m having one of those writer moments and I think it’s pretty fucking cool.

I got the copyedits for my story that will be appearing in Shimmer later this year, “The Emperor’s Gift”. Yet another side effect of the publishing timeline is that a story you wrote over a year ago may not appear for some time. I was a different writer when I wrote it – this was pre-Clarion, just as I was starting to get into the swing with Altered Fluid, before a lot of writing lessons had sunk in. It’s difficult to get back into a story like this without wanting to rip out all the guts and completely rewire it. It’s a challenge to get back into that headspace.

But I’m going to try…

I woke up this morning to a snow day and a message in my inbox. On my iPhone I can see the first line of text and the “Thank you” was enough to make me roll over and take refuge in the pillows for a short while longer.  I don’t have enough acceptances to know how they begin, but usually a “thank you” signals a rejection. Still, it was a nice rejection and the story just wasn’t right for the market. Which made the process of reading it much better. Now the process of figuring out where to send it next. It’s a story I believe in, so I want to give it the best possible shot.

It’s a reminder that the writing life often feels like it moves at a glacial pace. And that’s without even a novel in the picture. I have friends who have sold novels that won’t see the light of day for three years.

Still, I’m stuck with it.