...about my very first sale.

Small Monuments will be published in the upcoming issue (#36) of ChiZine. And I'm in some excellent company. To say I'm excited is an understatement, at best.

While you're poking around the site, be sure to stop in at Joanne Merriam's Aviary, a beautiful and haunting prose poem about... well, you'll see :).

Up now: polish the soft-spec My Father's Heroes and look at markets for it, and finish... quite a number of other things. I have five different fics out at various markets, at the moment, and I'm feeling better and better about the momentum I building up. Hey, that's at least 5000 words written this week, and with school eating up my time... things could be a lot worse.

I should also make a good-faith effort to update this journal more often.


*Trust me; I got all of my keymashing and exclamation-point abuse out of the way on a different journal. Hey, I'm allowed one squeefest ^_^.

Today I submitted The Lion And The Lizard to Abyss & Apex, and I'm going to mail off Machina to Analog. (I also sent Small Monuments to InterZone, but that's not the point.) So today I have the dubious honor of sending off a mythic fantasy piece and what's likely the hardest sci-fi work I've written to date.

If this sums up my writing career, I'm not going to complain.

I really need to get the ball rolling on my submissions. A lot of the stuff I need to revise, but I'm moving so slowly on those that I wonder if it'd be a better idea to keep submitting as I'm editing. I'll try it for a few stories--I'm young, it's at the very beginning of my career, I'm allowed to fumble about and make mistakes a bit--and hopefully I'll get quick enough with revising that I won't have to do it forever.

I'm revising Small Monuments.

This is a great deal more difficult than I thought it would be. I entered into it with what I thought were very concrete ideas of what to do--actually, what I had were very concrete ideas of what needed to be fixed. (I probably should have taken this into my revising class. Oh, well. I also want to beat Raze and Ruin into respectable form, so no harm there.) Right now I'm trying to cobble together a new draft by writing new scenes and making the old ones slightly less ephemeral, and figuring out how many references to Norse mythology I can sneak in without throwing people totally. (So far I'm up to one, and thinking that may be pushing it. How many people know who Lif and Lifthrasir are, anyway?)

It feels odd to take a once-polished draft, hack it apart, and make a rough draft out of it. I may finish this and then see what I can do if I just revise the old draft, compare the two, and... that's as far as I've thought it out. It'd be nice if the end result involved cake, through. Or publishing.

In the mean time, here! Have one of the inspirational poems I come close to referencing but actually don't--Dedication, by the marvelous Polish poet Czesław Miłosz:

I posted Small Monuments to OWW, and I have two stories there that I've read through and need to review. I hope to get that done tomorrow. radiationdream, I can also read through Silent Machines again and crit that for you if you want--and jacks_daydream, you need to post something. Gimme something to work with!

For now, though, I'm going to sleep.