First off, the good news. In a flurry of activity I finished last week's story on Sunday. Actually, the story only turned out to be 3.5k words long, so it wasn't a massive flurry, but I was pretty pleased with it. Of course, today I am in the middle of the "that story was crap" phase that lasts for anywhere between a week to a month after I've written the story. Steph has persuaded me to send the story out, so by the time it gets back I should be out of the phase and able to have some perspective.

I'm not sure what the next story will be yet. I'm sure I'll start something before too long, but it always takes me a while to shift into the correct mode for another story. I've no idea how these people who do several stories a week manage. I need to be involved in a story to write it well, and I can't just dive into that in an hour or so.

We went out and celebrated Steph's story sale to Strange Horizons on Saturday. I had a great pizza and Steph had something, well, pasta-ey, I guess. All this pasta stuff looks the same to me. ;-p We were going to wait until the new month before we went out, but we figured "no", being impatient types. We also went out to a cafe and Steph made herself sick on chocolate cheesecake.

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I sent a recent story through Critters for the first time for ages. It was a story I felt lacked something, but I wasn't sure how to fix it. To a degree I felt the problem was a "white room" problem--I didn't have a hold on the setting and I felt that showed. The critiques have been the usual mix. Some thought the story was brilliant. Some had no clue at all what was going on. Some had some perceptive criticisms and suggestions. One thing everyone has to learn when they use a critique group is that you have to pick the useful critiques carefully. Early on, most people try to incorporate all suggestions, and that always ruins a story. It is also often worth taking the approach that Ben Rosenbaum has talked about in the past, that of doing exactly the opposite of what your critiquers suggest.

I haven't absorbed the critiques yet, just skimmed them, so I'm not sure what approach I'll take. The key, though, is to do something. It's too tempting with so many critiques, many of which contradict each other, to decide that it's not worth the effort of revising what is, frankly, not one of my best stories.

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Work has been hellishly busy again, to the extent that last night I couldn't get to sleep because of all the things I knew I had to do by ages ago rushing through my mind. I'm on the point of emailing people and telling them that they just can't have any more website updates because I have too many other things to do. I'm supposed to be redeveloping the damned site, but I can't get a moment away from the updates to even look into it. And I have a bevy of other jobs I need to get on with that don't have anything to do with the damned site.

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I have a meeting straight after lunch for which I am supposed to have familiarised myself with a piece of software called Actinic, but I haven't had a chance to. Winging it again. Ho-hum.

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I read through the beginning of the kids novel I started recently, and although I like quite a bit of it, I realised I need to do some of the scenes more fully. It occurs to me that I should read the Harry Potter books. I don't think JK Rowling is a very good writer of sentences, but I think she does scenes extremely well, and that's where I need to focus at the moment. Any excuse to read books instead of write.