After an ominous silence for the last month or so, I've gotten a flurry of story rejections! There wasn't anything that really stung, but I was a bit disappointed nevertheless. There's always that hope that one of these days I'll be pleasantly surprised :)

Now I only have two stories in circulation! A couple of the stories that came back can be sent out again, and I'll need to get my act together to write some new ones and polish up a couple of others for submission. If only I had a crack team of mentally-enhanced story-writing chimps to help me crank out a pile of stories in short order...

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As I type, the air is filled with the sound of firecrackers and rockets exploding. This has been going on for the past two weeks, although the frequency has increased today for obvious reasons (4th of July, you know). At times I've wondered what the heck people are setting off out there, with the way some of these explosions are! No doubt there have been more than a few trips across state borders to purchase some of the more exotic varieties of exploding things. Be careful out there, people :)

Today we went to see Spiderman 2 at the theatre, and I was surprised that it exceeded my expectations. The stakes have been ratcheted even higher than in the first movie, and everything is bigger and better than before. Unlike most action flicks, a lot of attention has been paid to characterization in Spiderman 2, and there are also quite a few humorous moments that had the audience laughing out loud.

Like the Lord of the Rings movies, the afternoon session we'd been planning to go to was full, so we had to wait in line for the next session. I have a feeling this movie's going to rack up quite a chunk of change once the bean-counters have finished tallying the box office receipts! It'll be interesting to see if they can keep up the high standards with Spiderman 3, or whether they succumb to the lure of bug bucks and churn out a series of progressively more ridiculous sequels.

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My first week at work went quite well. I'm gradually coming up to speed with the project and getting settled back into the work routine--I even got up early this morning, fer crying out loud! I had a lot of documentation to read during the week, which wouldn't have been so bad if my computer had been ready earlier than Friday. Oh well.

The drive to and from work varies from tolerable to brutal, depending on traffic and general tiredness. I got an I-Pass unit the other day, so tollways aren't as much of a hassle now (I was starting to run out of change!). I'll be glad when we can move closer to where I work to cut the commuting time down to a minimum, but it'll still be quite awhile before that happens. Meanwhile, I was very pleased to receive my first paycheck today. There's nothing quite so wonderful as a fresh paycheck on a long weekend...

2004 Stats:

2004 Word count:	22,016
Stories written:	8
Total submissions:	19
Total acceptances:	0
Total rejections:	19
Waiting for response:	2
Books read:	9
Fiction Mags/Chapbooks read:	16