It's been a really good week. Back on Monday I sold my story When the Dragon Falls to Realms of Fantasy (see last journal entry). Last night I found out I had sold another short story, The Western Front, to The Third Alternative. Before those two stories, I hadn't sold anything since June and I was starting to wonder when I was ever going to sell anything again. Jim Van Pelt (a wonderful writer, btw) pointed out to another writer on the Speculations Rumormill how much of a rollercoaster ride publishing is and how, when he made a series of sales, he was told to enjoy it while it was happening. He's completely right. There seems to be no sense as to why things sell where they do and when they do. It's just the chance meeting of the right story with the right editor.

The Western Front is actually one of a series of linked stories called Maps of the World. Most of the other stories are out waiting at other magazines at the moment and I'm hoping they'll sell. I did try, at first, to sell all of these stories as a single, but at about 18,000 words and with a variety of styles in the stories, it wasn't really practical. One day I'd like to collect all the stories together, but for now I'll be happy to see them published wherever they end up.

I also finished my first editing pass-through of The Winter of the Earth and smoothed it out. I gave the whole thing to Steph this morning, and outrageously, she managed to read the whole novel in an hour. (Do you know how long it took me to write the damned thing???) I'll do the next (and possibly final) pass through this week, then send it off to the agent and cross my fingers.

#
We didn't do a full Thanksgiving celebration this year. We both had to work in the morning, and we didn't get home until after 2pm. Instead, we spent a couple of hours giving the house a very thorough clean and then had friends around for drinks. Justina made a very complex and sickly-looking cake (an Esterhazy Cream Torte, apparently) in celebration of Steph sending her Esterhazy novel off to an agent. We had a great time and went to bed too late.

I've taken the day off today (part of my ongoing Americanization is taking holidays on American public holidays (that and always finding myself writing "gotten" instead of "got" and no longer knowing whether to write "-zation" or "-sation" at the end of words)).

We're going out to Borders/Starbucks to do some writing, then having pancakes for lunch (hopefully). All is well over here.