I just registered for Potlatch, the con that's used to raise funds for Clarion West. I'd been going back and forth about whether to go for a while, but then last week a friend reminded me that it falls near her birthday, so I need to come to buy her drinks. Which makes sense.

Anyway, as I've commented a couple of times, I love the idea of living in the place the whole world goes for Spring Break, and spending my Spring Break in the rather thoroughly un-tropical city of Portland. Plus, there should be at least some Tinas there, as well as other interesting people, so it should be a good time.

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After the close-but-no-cigar from Strange Horizons, I sent "Sing, Goddess" through the local crit group last week for last minute spit and polish before sending it anywhere else. Then today, while thinking about something completely different, I remembered this sentence near the beginning of the story that had been really bothering me, but which I had no idea what to do about.

I had to change it in the post-Clarion version because someone pointed out (correctly) that "little green fuckers" and "this whole fucking war" was just too much fuck for one two-sentence stretch, plus I used "little yellow eyes" later in the same sentence as "little green fuckers," so there was all sorts of repetition going on.

Which was true, so I changed it, but the new version has always sounded horribly awkward to me. Pulling up the Word file today, it finally hit me that I could change the little green fuckers back to little green fuckers if I changed the little yellow eyes to tiny yellow eyes (since "little green fuckers with tiny yellow eyes" somehow sounds much better to me in any case than "tiny green fuckers with little yellow eyes") and "this whole fucking war" (a phrase that sounds horribly cliche anyway) to "this entire war," and suddenly the whole passage was humming again like it was the first time. This led to going through and (even though I'd determined that, having been revised to death, I was definitely going to stop line-editing now) reading the whole thing aloud again, thus cleaning up several sentences like that. (The exercise of doing so had become pretty pointless a while ago, but I think at this point enough time had passed since I did it last that I could look at it with relatively fresh eyes, and the exercise became poiny again.) I'm much happier now, but this time for real I really will stop messing with it. It's going to the post office this afternoon, to be sent off to F&SF, at which point I will really and truly stop worrying at it for a while.

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And, on a related note, I was quite relieved to have Tina C. inform me today that the real starting and ending dates for NanoWriMo, for those of us who know better, are tomorrow and December 15th. Thank God. Between Austin, getting sick and garden variety writers' block, I hadn't written one single word yet.