I got my reviews written, so, whoo! I made some money yesterday. I really liked all three books (The Overnight, Mad Dog Summer, and Night Visions 11), so the reviewing was easy.

Also yesterday, I got my formal acceptance from Houghton Mifflin for "Hart & Boot." Interesting data point: they pay about five times better than the genre year's bests. (I know people who've gotten small-press novel advances in the same price range.) I also wrote my contributor bio for them and a little mini-essay about why/how I wrote the story. Reading through old volumes of BASS to see how people approached this, I found that some people write full-blown essays about the creative process, while other people say "I wrote this on my houseboat the summer I was living in Kamchatka" and that's it. The one I wrote is sort of in-between. I also very naturally got to plug my first novel, since "Hart & Boot" was the result of a sideline I followed while researching Old West stuff for Rangergirl.

And today my porn story was accepted.

So all together that's enough money to pay for a nice chunk of the honeymoon. With the Dutch sale and the BASS reprint, I'm suddenly a lot less panicked about paying for the wedding and the honeymoon. Sure, the money will take forever to arrive (it's writing money, after all), but it'll probably get here by October.

Not to make it sound like it's all about the money. When I'm writing, I'm not thinking "This'll bring me a nice chunk of change!" (Unless I'm writing non-fiction, in which case I'm thinking, "They don't pay me enough for this! This shit is difficult! Meh!") Frankly I'm just still a little astonished that people are giving me money for (shh, this is a secret, don't tell) stuff I would have written anyway. I'm a long way from making enough money to live solely as a writer, but every time a check comes, it's like a little miracle -- getting paid to do the one thing I love above all other endeavors. Wow. I step back a little sometimes and marvel. Life's pretty good.