Some good news last night: Janet won the eBay auction for the CD burner she was bidding on (and $20 below the BuyItNow price), and I sold another story! My YA fantasy story "Watersnake, Firesnake" will be appearing in Claw & Quill sometime in the near future. Yay! Woo! And so forth!

This weekend was a very busy and productive one.

Went through all the materials for the PhD programs I'm applying for and gathered together the information needed for the three people who are going to recommend me for those programs. I'll stop by campus tomorrow and drop them off to John Kessel, Jon Thompson and Wilton Barnhardt.

Looked over all of the SCS stories and made final editing suggestions, to be approved by those authors. Janet's got almost the entire book laid out now (and has some good advice on keeping the layout person happy), and once we receive the revised copies of these last edited stories, we'll be able to hand the thing off to a printer. Sadly, it looks like we'll be leaving the author bios out of the book because they would take up nine pages, but we still have them in all their glory on the SCS page. As it is, we have a very close page count right now, and will be able to get honest quotes from the printer folk. The only challenge seems to be finding one that will do cookbook-style double loop, or twin loop, binding. Janet and I really want the books to be bound this way, though we're not going to pay a fortune just to get it. If those of you in the Raleigh area happen to know of a printer who binds this way (not GBC/comb, or spiral, or spiro), please let me know.

Also finished drawing up the contracts for the SCS contributors, up until 12:30 last night to do so, and I'll send them out this afternoon. I looked over the several contracts I've gotten for fiction, and combined and altered them to suit our purposes. I think it's a very fair contract, since I want to be as considerate to our authors as possible. Once I get the contracts back I'll send out payment, which is a good incentive for the authors to return the contracts quickly.

Rewrote "Irregardless" as a 900-word rant, and I like it much, much more; I tried three different drafts and none of them seemed right and all of them too long, so I revisted the style I used in "Most Excellent" and am coming to realize that yes indeedy, this is the style for me. It's much more stream-of-consciousness than I'm used to, but I'm liking it a whole helluva lot. It's much shorter than the original (which was at ~5600 words), but I was also able to extract another 2600-word story from that original ("A Night in the Great Dismal Swamp"), so if I combine these, it adds up to 3500 words, and I don't feel so bad. Better to have two good short ones than one bad long one.

So today I need to rewrite "Stuck," using the beginning that Wilton Barnhardt suggested, which seems to gel well with my groovy new writing style. This one will be longer, and more fantastical than the original, and it's due tomorrow.

I also need to visit the reference room of the library today and copy some articles for the three 2-page response papers for my Shakespeare class. The articles will be on the last three plays we read: Macbeth, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. I already found one online, so I'll need to look for two more. The papers are due before grades are turned in, but I'm going to try to finish them by Friday.

And I need to visit the student health center for a refill on my inhaler, since I tried to use it this weekend and the Albuterol is gone gone gone. Luckily the asthma wasn't bothering me too much yesterday, but I'll need it for future occurences.

That's the haps until this weekend, when I'll be trying to finish "Reality, Interrupted" in time to submit it to Polyphony.

It really helps writing all this stuff down to keep my priorities current, and also to manage everything. I'm better able to tackle one thing at a time and not feel so overwhelmed this way.

Now Reading:
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Stories Out to Publishers:
7

Books Read This Year:
63

Zines/Graphic Novels/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
31