First of all, really cool news: a fiction sale! Ms. H.L. Shaw just bought my naughty story "Skin Flute" for the newly revamped online erotica zine Fishnet! Yay! She said it should be published soon, possibly as soon as next Tuesday. Mom, just a heads-up: this probably a story you want to avoid.

This will be the first story I've sold for more than $10, and I'll be joining the ranks of fellow skiffy pals Mike Jasper, Nick Mamatas and Claude Lalumière. Yee-haw! Janet and I did a little dance around the apartment after getting the news this afternoon. We celebrated by going to the grocery store and eating tilapia with curry powder tonight for dinner.

The interview with Daniel Wallace is going well, and should hopefully be finished up by the end of the month. The paycheck and contract for the Zivkovic interview came yesterday, as well as Janet's paycheck for the new Strange Horizons membership card. It feels nice being paid for my writing.

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Janet and I saw two really interesting films recently, both documentaries. One was Control Room, about the inner workings of Al-Jazeera and their coverage of the Iraq war, and About Baghdad, where Iraqis themselves -- cab drivers, poets, lawyers, artists, engineers -- were interviewed a year ago. The thing that struck me about both films is the number of Iraqis saying how they were glad Saddam Hussein was gone, and that they were grateful the American forces had gotten rid of him; there were many stories they relayed about how unbelievably brutal he and his cronies were to his own people. But they feel that now that he is gone, they should be allowed to run their own country again. Rania Masri, one of the producers of About Baghdad was there answering questions at the end of the film, and she mentioned that what is being taken for anti-Americanism by the US media is actually anti-occupationism. There were quite a few people who said that they believed in the American people, but disagreed in the decisions of our government. A lot of them don't hate us, they just hate being occupied by a military force, and that force is unfortunately being led by us.

One website she mentioned was Life for Relief and Development, an organization that is trying to get humanitarian aid directly to the people of Iraq. If you have the means, please consider donating some money. They still don't have electricity or clean water in many places, and unemployment is somewhere around 85% right now. I just donated the money I got paid for my interview with Zoran to them.

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Not much else going on right now. Because of some pretty heated office politics at the day job, I'm not sure I can count on work from them for the rest of the summer. So if anyone knows of writing-related work coming up, please let me know in the comments. The lady who had a book to be edited didn't call me back, so I'm guessing my quote was too high for her.

This might actually be a good thing, since I have an exam to prepare for: the graduate requirement of foreign language written proficiency. Usually, they have a course in the language you'll be testing in, to brush up. Unfortunately, the class in French is not being offered next year, so I'll have to study for it on my own. One of my classmates is in the same bind, and we've talked about studying together; also, my mother majored in French, and offered to help. So I should be okay.

I have two pieces of writing to revise, and four to write, and I'm finding it extremely hard to do this while out of work. This seems to be a fairly universal thing, that when we have no structure to our day, we do much less writing than if we have a day job or other responsibilities. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to set the alarm and attempt to stick to some sort of schedule. Let's see if it works.

Now Reading:
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Stories Out to Publishers:
6

Books Read This Year:
38

Zines/Graphic Novels/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
24