My whelm feels somewhat over, so I thought, rather than force myself to make a new blog post on some topic, I’ll list what I’m up to now.
Tonight I’m reading at Appletree Books for National Poetry Month. It’s very kind of them to invite all the poets who participated in their contest to read. I’m trying to decide which poem to do, and know I’ll play it by ear.
Last night I got a new cat. Well, a new cat-boarder. A friend is in a situation where she can’t have her kitty and so I agreed to take the fluffbutt on. Hippo is a super affectionate and fluffy cat and has already given up hiding under the sofa.
I do have about 8 blog post drafts I’m not ready to publish for various reasons. One of them is a video I’m putting together of how I draw my drawings. I’m 80% done with it but I need time in a place with no sound to do the voiceover.
I’ve completed gathering all the tables of contents for nine speculative fiction magazines for my Magazine Project: I want to generate statistics for the percentage of women writing as women over time, and whether they get their names on the covers. My first result is: assigning genders to names is hard.
I’m on magazine six of nine cleaning up the data before I can start the fun chart-making.
The magazine project has had me reading more golden and silver-age stuff, and learning more about names that were once prominent in our industry that I hadn’t ever heard of before!
Saturday I’ll be back at Appletree Books to read for Independent Bookstore Day. Yes, also panicking over what to read. I think maybe “Quirks” because it’s set locally.
I’m revising a story about a woman killing a merman near Blackpool in 1927. I really like it. I’m afraid it will be rejected a lot.
I have 15 stories out. I try to keep 20 out at a time but the rejections are flowing in and not that many magazines are open, so there are a lot of stories I have no place to send.
I’m collecting lots of rejections from agent queries too.
And poetry rejections.
So it doesn’t look like I’m doing much, but I really am. Revising things, sending them out, getting rejected.
Oh, and doing slush reading. I’ve been slushing for Clarkesworld for one year now, and I started slushing for Reckoning a while ago. Maybe this is why I can’t sell anything anymore… I’ve sewn a harvest of karma rejecting other people. Still, it’s nice to be able to say I’ve accomplished something every day by checking in and doing my assigned reading.
I’m posting my first-draft novel “Vampires vs. Maturity” every Monday now at Curious Fictions for my subscribers. I hope they find it interesting.
I’m also posting stories there as their rights release, starting with things from the print magazines since many people may have missed them.
And I started knitting a sweater just to use up some weird yarn I have. It’s a light weave in lightweight yarn, I’m hoping it’ll be a sort of throw-on-summer-thing.
OH. And helping Brian with Tinselfly every single chance I can or whenever I think of something I can do on it. Tinselfly! It must be finished!
So yeah… I feel like a waste of human flesh who gets nothing done lately, but part of that is so many things are just… in progress. And that’s okay. You don’t need to finish things to be working. You just need to be working.
Keep swimming until that far shore arrives.
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