Words Written: “Valentine”: 529

Over in her journal, Jenn has proposed a Dare from 15 April through 15 May. Whatever goals you want to set, whether writing or otherwise.

So, along with the 500-words-a-day thing, my Dare goal is to get both An Ever-Turning Wheel and Waking the Witch revised and in the mail to editors and agents. I’ll also be working on anthology stories and either the project with Teresa (depending on some upcoming events) or a new Brava novel, but I can’t really quantify any of that into the Dare.

Meanwhile, I’m also toying with doing a July Book-in-a-Week Dare. I didn’t sign up go to the OCW Workshop House to do it, because of work and money and all that. Alas, the workshop has been cancelled (as have almost all workshops except novel workshops), but some folks are still going to do the Dare. I’m very, very close to asking for the week off. Since I’m taking a week off in September for a novel workshop and a genre structure workshop (the last one), I’m not entirely sure I can swing the time. But oh, so very tempting.

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The saga of the story contract continues, but with better news! We politely and apologetically explained that we could not in good conscience sign the contract as written, but it turned out the book was already in production, so the editor got the okay from highers-up to modify the contract. It’s still not as good as it could be, but it’s much better, and so we agreed to sign.

In other related news, Dean posted an interesting post to one of the OCW lists. I can’t reproduce it here, but it was about sales vs. publication. What you should be counting is sales—meaning, the editor accepted the story or novel. Not payment, and not publication, because lots of things can happen between the acceptance and those other things. He used my SNW 8 situation as an example—I can count that as a sale, even though my story won’t appear in the book. So that’s kind of spiff, you know? That gives me two more pro sales (I also had a story accepted by Dark Regions before they folded).

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Today I learned that California was named by Spanish conquistadors, possibly Cortez, after an imaginary island described as an earthly paradise in a Spanish romance from 1510. There’s a story in there…

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I tipped my head back to get the last swallow of soda, and in the pale blue sky I saw a series of contrails. Between the top two is the beginning of the moon, and because it’s not quite 1 p.m., the angle is unfamiliar—all I can see is the curve at the top, with the ends pointing almost straight down. Beautiful, mysterious, and certainly not what I expected to see as I finished my lunch.

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Currently Reading: The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (yeah, finally!)

Lately Listened To: Styx, snippets of their new album Big Bang Theory

Recently Watched: “Veronica Mars” (hurrah, Alyson Hannigan will be back next week!)