Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?

It's been a while since I posted. (My lovely and talented wife prodded me about that; I communicate better in writing than verbally, so she likes it when I post about what I'm doing and thinking.) So here goes:

I have a Nook now. I bought Snippy one as an early birthday present in June. She's enjoyed it immensely. She uses it all the time, and has loaded it with lots of books, some purchased, some free, some fanfic she snagged from teh internetz. I am most impressed by the eInk display. When we could read it under the bright summer sun at the beach as easily as any paperback book (try THAT with a laptop!), I was sold. (Yes, I know it isn't only the Nook that has eInk--shut up!)

So last weekend, we bought ME a Nook as an early birthday present. (Very early--my birthday's in January.) I immediately went out and downloaded a bunch of free fiction from Barnes & Nobles' website, and from the Baen Free Library. I also found a piece of software named Calibre, which will convert a wide variety of electronic formats into another wide variety of electronic formats, which means I can turn html docs (like fanfic on webpages) into epub documents my Nook can read. It can also turn .lit format documents into epub format--so I have all my Cobblestone stories on my Nook now too. (I'm also using the cover art from those stories as screensavers, so we can tell which Nook is mine.) I will no doubt be buying books for my Nook eventually, but I'm trying not to spend any money on that just now.

You see, we're going to sell the house. We've toyed with the idea for years, sometimes seriously, sometimes as a "what if" game. But just recently we flipped from "we could sell the house" to "we are selling the house." It seems like the thing to do. Because we (and by "we" I mean my lovely and talented wife, since it's her house) were smart, we never overmortgaged the house during the real estate bubble. Which means that we can easily get considerably more for it than we owe; how much more depends on how much work we want to put into buffing it up for resale. We'll be talking to our realtor about how to get the best bang for our buck on that score. We already had a stager look at the property and give us a long list of suggestions; the realtor will know better which ones will make the biggest difference in what we can reasonably ask for the house.

So we've spent the last week (Snippy's vacation from work) drifting through the house trying to decide what we'll keep and use when we move (into an apartment, most likely), what we'll keep and store (for an eventual new house purchase down the road), what we can sell or donate, and what we can trash. Also? Packing. TWENTY-FIVE banker boxes of books are already stacked in a corner of the dining room and we haven't packed up all the books yet! (Another reason for the Nook--we won't go into complete reading withdrawal while we stage the house for sale--which means no or only a handful of books in sight.)

We've both bounced between excitement and terror. Usually not at the same time, so we could encourage one another. But it's going to be a stressful few months as we work to pack, clean, store or dispose of stuff, get the house whipped into shape, and then live like guests while we keep it in shape to show off until we can sell it. We'll manage, though. Despite occasional doubts, we thought long and hard (and discussed it repeatedly), before deciding this was a good decision.

My vacation from writing has extended through this week. I haven't written a damn thing. So this coming week, it's back on the horse, dammit! I have two novels yet to finish. If I start feeling like nobody would ever buy what I want to write, I need to go look a the "recent deals" listings on Publisher's Marketplace. There are premises for novels that I find bizarrely unlikely and yet someone bought it! No idea too outrageous. I just need to write it well.

So, in the spirit of throwing myself back into the game, I hereby announce my intent to write a cyberpunk tale. (I saw a call for cyberpunk novellas from one of the big epublishers; I may not actually send it to them, though. They want a very narrow word count: 25-30K. No more, no less. Another market won't have so many genre stories flooding their in-box, and won't care about the word count since they all publsh in numerous lengths. But I do intend to write it. Cue Yul Brynner from The Ten Commandments:

"So let it be written, SO LET IT BE WRITTEN!"

...okay, that's not exactly how the quote goes. Close enough, though.

In other writing news, I got a rejection on a story I sent to a new market. I discovered the market via Duotrope's Digest, where it was flagged as a "fledgling" market, meaning it had been in existence for less than six months. Today I got the weekly email from Duotrope that lists new markets, open anthologies, markets which have temporarily closed (or reopened), and dead markets. Guess who was among the newly dead? Yep. The same folks who rejected me.

Just as well they rejected me, I suppose. It would have been a major bummer to have gotten an acceptance--only to discover that the market had immediately folded.

There's been no movement on a couple of recent short story submissions. They're both to markets which have given me personal rejections, so I'm getting closer to success there. I like to think that that (no response yet) is a good sign; it means they haven't immediately rejected them. On the other hand, I'm told that the NYC publishing world more or less shuts down in August when everyone takes their vacations...so maybe the manuscripts have simply sat unread all last month. We'll see.

Also, no movement on my two novel manuscripts in a while either. We'll see how it goes.

Stories in Circulation: 12
Rejections: 57
Stories Accepted: SEVEN
Stories to Resubmit: 1

Novel Queries
Strange Attractors (urban fantasy): 4 queries out, 9 rejections
Repossessor (science fiction): 5 queries out, no responses