Woohoo! I got the news last night that I've sold my short story, "When the Dragon Falls," to Realms of Fantasy. We did happy dances and Nika barked and jumped around. Luckily the curtains were pulled so no one could see. This is my third sale to them, so I'm starting to think of myself as a regular there (well, in a few more sales...) No news yet when it'll be published. I'd guess 8 months to a year from now based on previous experience. Embarrassingly, I'd been told through a semi-official channel that all outstanding submissions to RoF had been rejected, so I'd sent the story elsewhere. I had to send a grovelling apology and withdrawal.

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Other good news is that I've finished adding scenes to The Winter of the Earth. The new draft is now complete (this is the sixth draft of the damned thing, and not the last, I'm sure!) and it's about 42,000 words long using a crude estimate. This hits the target the agent suggested of 40-45,000 words. Now I have to go through and polish the story until it shines. I haven't read it through since I added the new stuff, so I'm really hoping it doesn't suck now.

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We went out to the new Borders/Starbucks again last night. I looked at crappy magazines while Steph read up about Tuscany for a novel and kept pointing out scenic photos. I fear we will end up going there before long. ;p

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I've been forcing myself to make time at work to make progress learning PHP and MySQL. The latter I can do reasonably well, although I haven't tried anything complicated. The former I can only do basics. Unfortunately, all my other work is piling up behind me and I'm trying not to look at it so it doesn't get ideas above its station.