(Having once sung the Messiah with my university choir, I tend to get the entire damned thing stuck in my head at this time of year, except for the parts without a soprano part, which didn’t get rehearsed at the same times.)
Major technical problems at Casa Clairification the last few weeks: I couldn’t get online much at all. What began as a major annoyance turned out to be a source of exactly the right kind of boredom. Instead of puttering about reading the words of others, I buckled down and wrote some of my own. Anyone actually prolific will scoff at these counts, no doubt. All I can say in my defense is that it’s also busy season at the Day Career and I keep being the one to turn the lights out at the office.
Not-a-Werewolf Book: 9990 words since Nov 17
Godot Story: 2789 words (actually, quite a few more words than that, but the rest of them sucked, and were duly excised)
“The Tongue of Bees”, formerly “BEitD”, formerly “LtLCBftCaW”, is now in the mail. !!!! You’d think this would involve about thirty seconds: print story, stick story in envelope, lick envelope, affix stamp. In fact–and if anything was to make me give up writing, it would be this–I have to first re-read the manuscript guidelines eight or ten times, print out the story, discover a misplaced apostrophe or something, fix it and print it again (ad nauseam), write my address on the SASE with a hand shaking enough to render it illegible, smear the ink, write another, seal the damned thing, tear it open again to double check everything, etc, etc.
I don’t believe I will make such a fuss about all of my stories, but this is the first story I’ve put in the mail in seven or eight years, and the first to a SFF market in my adult life. I would very much like to sell it. It’s a good one.
