author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I'm getting mentions in reviews. It's surreal.

Blood and Other Cravings is getting reviewed. It's getting quite nice reviews. And the surreal thing is when one of them mentions my story specifically. And favorably. With complimentary adjectives. Wow.

Here's a handful of reviews and/or reader responses that are online right now:

• Shroud Magazine
• The Tomb of Dark Delights (No permalink; review may drift downward the page over time)
• The first review from Publisher's Weekly

Pretty much all of these made me grin foolishly and sort of float about for the rest of the day. And beyond the immediate happiness of "They like me! They said so! They mentioned me by name!" there's the simple pride in knowing I got to be part of a book that reviewers agree is full of wonderful stories.

Ellen Datlow is posting about reviews on her LJ as they happen. Her alerts are how I'm finding out about 'em.

Another awesome thing that's up: The Vampire Book Club is giving away a copy of Blood and Other Cravings to one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is leave a comment in response to the post describing "what draws you to vampires." To kick things off, they first posed the question to the anthology's contributors, and the answers some of us came up with are published there for your reading pleasure.

It was a weird question for me. I'm not actually aware of being drawn to vampire stories, and I certainly didn't set out to write one. And yet in a way that's what I ended up doing. Why? "Because I had this weird dream" sort of lacks something as an answer. I hope the answer I finally came up with is interesting, or at least doesn't sound gawdawfully pretentious.

(I have no idea where the paragraph breaks came from. No one else seems to have them, and I'm pretty sure I didn't put them there.)

The last bit of news concerning this anthology is that there may be certain anthology-promoting activities at World Fantasy 2011 should enough contributors be around to participate. I'm hoping to be part of that. It depends on if I make it off the wait list and into actual attending membership; WFC sold out this year because, I think, of its all-star Guest of Honor list. (WFC, what were you thinking? You are small. Why are you fielding a World Con-sized GoH docket?) It also depends on if I just go "F*&# it" and head over to San Diego for the weekend regardless.

So there were email communications about that this morning. Then, because apparently driving around Denver and bussing back up to Boulder is the Most Exhausting Thing Evar, I wound up hard asleep for a few hours this afternoon and dreamt that I suddenly remembered I was supposed to send Ellen a recording of me reading my story by today at 5:35 PM, and it was 5:30 PM now, but I was going to record it anyway, but John was sitting next to me making a lot of noise on his computer so I couldn't. As it happens, 5:35 AM is when my bus leaves the Amtrak station Monday morning, which because the Amtrak station only opens at 5:30 is why I was in Denver picking up my tickets ahead of time. O HAI THER BRAIN I C WUT U DID THER

Er. About that bus. The bus goes to Raton, New Mexico, whence my train to Chicago, whence my train to New Orleans. Yes, this is more complicated than it ought to be. The California Zephyr is not running between Denver and Chicago during the month of September because what with flooding in Omaha and track damage and freight traffic bottlenecks, there was so much constant lateness they just gave up. It seems I've been negotiating non-standard Amtrak accommodations all year. This appears to be what happens to rail travel when every waterway in the US appears eager to flood at the slightest provocation. Please to stop that, US waterways! Also, please to reverse global climate change and stop messing with weather systems. Please?

I suppose I could just break down and get airfare. But I'm out of practice putting up with airport TSA stupidity. It's been so nice not having to worry over whether some bully in a uniform is going to make an issue over my knitting needles, fountain pens, or electronic accessories. And I'm kind of looking forward to riding the Southwest Chief for the first time.

Today was a lovely productive day.

Well... more productive than many days have been.

And... the producing was sort of spread out over the entire day with large breaks in between for 3-player Dominion (base set + Intrigue; picked up Cornucopia but haven't opened it yet) and Plants vz. Zombies (Vasebreaker Endless).

And also... productivity only happened at all thanks to Glitch being closed up between play-tests. When it comes to my various video game addictions, I have about as much self-control as does my cat Uno when encountering a loaf of bread on the table and no humans within earshot.

(There is a point here to be made about the similarity between collecting resources in Glitch and repeatedly hitting a slot machine's button in a casino, but I suspect that will wait until I finally get to my Renovation blogging. My much delayed but definitely planned Renovation blogging.)

But, all self-deprecating caveats aside, stuff done up and got done. And not just Examiner-blogging and DMS articles (although two DMS articles in a day is pretty big, for me; that hasn't happened in months). No. Some of it was fiction.

Getting anything done at all was a bit of a feat considering that Mondays usually start off with four or five hours at Abbondanza Organic Seeds & Produce, helping out the crew in some capacity or another. Today being Labor Day meant no guaranteed exception. Three years of weekly farm shifts, more or less, have led me to forget holidays exist; plants don't stop growing just because the post office closed its doors, you see. But on July 4 this year I showed up only to discover that sometimes farm crews do take holidays. So it seemed wise to double-check. Good thing, too. The reply came, telling me to stay home and enjoy a day off.

Now, Mondays that start on the farm, if the work is hard and the sun is hot, usually send me to bed for the afternoon and leave me in a daze for the rest of the evening. Writing-wise, they go nowhere. But Mondays where unforseen circumstances keep me home also tend to go nowhere, too. It's like part of my brain is punishing me for letting folks down. "Don't think this means you get to enjoy the day, you lazy sod. You don't get rewarded for weaseling out of your shift."

(This part of my brain is not well disposed towards me. Next time it shows up I think I should make it some hot tea and give it Velvet the unicorn to hug. Maybe I should do that for myself, too, next time I'm in a snit and hard to be around.)

But today I stayed home and work got done. (I suspect that having been explicitly told to stay home helped assuage the punishment monster.) Work got done... and fiction actually got worked on. Working on fiction was what I set out to blog about, here. ("Remember Alice? This is a song about Alice...")

Looking back, I think two things made a huge difference. One was deciding that fiction was going to come first today. The second thing was deciding that "fiction" meant something specific. More specific than "Write a new short story." More specific even than "Work on that short story you claim tried to eat your brain last week, whatever happened to that, eh?" More specific even. "Do you really need a Maiden/Mother/Crone triad in this story?" There.

John gets credit for this. Some time ago, when I was describing my checklist method for getting through a day's work, my husband got skeptical and questioned the effectiveness of a checklist item that simply read "Fiction." The likelihood of a task getting done, he pointed out, is directly proportional to how well defined that task is. His advice stuck with me, somewhere in the vague back of my head, and it jumped out and pounced on me in the shower this morning.

So the question Does a Demeter/Persephone story benefit from being conflated with the Maiden/Mother/Crone template, and if so, who is the Crone? sort of rattled away in my brain, until I remembered this wonderful article a friend of mine wrote about the Mysteries at Eleusis. And then I got to poking the internet until more stuff about Baubo fell out. Baubo was, to oversimplify things terribly, an old woman who cheered Demeter up during the time of Persephone's abduction by, depending on the version of the story, telling lewd jokes, dancing suggestively, and/or lifting up her skirt and flashing her lady-bits.

That's awesome. I suddenly had this image of Demi standing at the window of a big house up by Wonderland Lake, staring out into the rain, wishing she didn't have to go through Cory's death all over again, and hoping that old Billie Rae wasn't going to do something embarrassing at the wake tonight. (These names are probably temporary. I suck at names.)

And then the last scene in the story totally rewrote itself in my head. Whereas before the Crone figure would come in and be very serious about the unpleasant ritual thing that had to happen, now I saw her coming in with a joke and a silly grin. And her jovial attitude would make the unpleasant ritual thing seem even more dire than a serious all-business attitude would.

I didn't actually commit new words to paper. But I got a new lead on the story. That's huge. It's like I'd entered a circular maze last week but found the inner wall sealed until today, when a new door opened up and allowed me one step closer to the center.

It's like, instead of putting off a story for weeks and weeks and feeling terribly guilty about it and then realizing later that those weeks and weeks had to happen for the story to turn out the way it did, I sat down and made composting happen on purpose.

As is often the case, Havi Brooks speaks directly to this important difference:

This is what most people in the "productivity" world aren't realizing. Procrastination is almost never actual procrastination. It's almost always just this:

You processing or letting something percolate + fear + guilt

That's all it is. If you remove the guilt and the fear, it turns out that you're not procrastinating at all, you're just thinking about something.

So this morning was like every other morning that's come and gone since the brain-hijacking incident, in that I didn't actually write the new draft of the story. But this morning was different because instead of lying down under a guilt-inducing herd of stampeding shoulds, I sat up and did the "thinking about something" deliberately. This was active composting. And rather than focusing on the not writing part, which always results in feeling like a failure, I specifically gave myself permission to consider it progress, because that's exactly what it was. A door opened up in what was previously smooth, unbroken wall. Progress.

Active composting: Highly recommended.

Generally this is a good thing. The best thing, even. When a story hijacks an author's brain, it isn't an attack to be resisted or defended against, though life circumstances may require its temporary deferral -- a day job, children to care for, family emergencies, etcetera. (I am blessed in having no reason to defer other than my own procrastinatory tendencies. Except maybe because other stories have been trying to hijack me too.) No, a story with that kind of compulsive energy is rather a sign that the author should be writing that story. So. Yay!

I'm not sure to what extent I actually believe those who say "If you're going to be a writer, you need to not be able to not write." I mean, I believe it in the general and in the abstract: I am a writer, I need to be a writer, I don't know who I'd be if I weren't a writer, I'm not sure there'd be anyone else for me to be if I couldn't be a writer. But speaking in the everyday activity sense, I am rarely compelled to write. Every once in a while I undergo typewriter rage, but most of the time it's really easy not to write.

This is normal. Work is work. It's beloved work, it's my life's work, but it's still work. If you don't experience it that way, good for you, I am envious, but please don't think that your experience is prescriptive for every other writer. Don't give me the line, "If you think it's work, maybe it's not really your life's calling." The only reasons to think writing isn't one's life calling is if one has identified another life calling, and/or if one does not enjoy writing.

Well, in some way or other, anyway. "Enjoy writing" has many valid interpretations beyond "constantly finds the act of writing to be sheer bliss." It can also mean "Feels tearfully fulfilled when a story is complete and wants to do it again despite finding the actual act of writing an unmitigated tormentuous ordeal."

I'm somewhere in between. I love telling stories. I love babbling out rougher-than-rough draft. I put myself to sleep at night by imagining stories as though they were movies I were watching in my head. I have wept tears of joy to reread a much-revised story and realize, "Yes. This is it." And then I find the act of revising a story to a potentially publishishable state to be work. So I avoid it.

There is more to be said about avoiding writing even though one experiences writing as one's life's calling. I think I'll say it later, because I had a point I was getting to here.

My point here is, I was procrastinating my day's work again this morning when a story showed up and hijacked my brain.

I was packing up my bookbag when I spotted the book I'd fallen asleep rereading last night, Patricia McKillip's Winter Rose, and I thought, "Oh, one more chapter". Which of course meant two hours later, having reached THE END, I looked rather guiltily at the clock.

But while I was reading, a story crept up on me and grabbed hold.

I do this, sometimes. I can't do it with books that are new to me, but even on the first reread a book can become a comfortable, well-known friend, and I can relive its story while simultaneously chewing on my own. Or getting chewed on by my own stories. This morning, it was more the latter than the former.

The story that hijacked me is a Maiden/Mother/Crone story. And it's a transformation story. (I seem to be mainly writing transformation stories. Remember I said that when Deaths in a Dream, or whatever it finally ends up being called, finally makes its way to bookshelves. In the year 2052, if I'm lucky.) It involves some fairy tale images that have stuck with me, hard, such that they are personal powerhouses of myth and emotion.

And, looking back on it, I realize it's a subversion of Wiccan... liturgy, I guess. Whatever we've got that, in a non-heirarchical, non-organized religion, counts as scripture. Traditional Wicca -- which is to say, Wicca as it was described by its founders and first promoters -- is agressively heteronormative. There's a Goddess; there's a God who is Her consort. Every year the God fathers himself upon the Goddess at Beltaine, dies at Samhain, and is reborn of the Goddess at Winter Solstice. The High Priest and a High Priestess embody the God and Goddess in the Circle, often reenacting the divine sex act symbollically by means of the Priest inserting the athame (ritual knife) in the chalice (fancy cup). THIS IS NOT SUBTLE.

Obviously this is not true of all Wicca or of all Wiccans, but it's the spin you get when you read Buckland and Gardner and even as ecclectic and non-hetero a writer as Scott Cunningham. It was certainly the only deity story I knew in my own practice for a long time. And I spent an embarrassingly long time, for a bisexual woman who wants to be a good QUILTBAG ally, being perfectly comfortable with this.

But it seems in my fiction I am unconsciously subverting this, because here I'm envisioning a Maiden/Mother/Crone triad who do their own damn eternal reconceiving and rebirthing, thank you very much. We do not require a divine penis in this mythology! Take that, evildoers! It took me awhile to realize that this is what I was doing, but now that I do realize it, I'm feeling pretty damn smug about it.

(Come to think about it, this is not my first time rejecting heterosexual reproduction in speculative fiction. As you shall see. Click link below, order book, yadda yadda promotional yadda.)

Additionally, today's brain-hijacker had its origins in a dream I had years ago. This is true of many of my most complusvie "write me NOW" stories; it was true of "First Breath" (which will see print and bookstore shelves as part of Blood and Other Cravings This Month! Squee!). In the case of this story, the one that's hijacking me today, less of the plot was in the original dream than is sometimes the case. (I don't conceive of stories whole cloth from dreams. I get really emotional kernals of story whose complete stories I have to figure out. My dreams make me do all the work. I WISH TO MAKE A COMPLAINT.) The dream goes something like this:

I am grieving the death of a close friend. And suddenly there's her ex-boyfriend revealing to me that he killed her. Apparently they had so many mutual friends that his social circle became a very uncomfortable place after they broke up. He had to remove her from the picture. I fly into a rage upon hearing this, pounding fists against his chest and screaming You killed her! She was my friend, and you killed her! He laughs bewilderedly at my ineffectual fury and cannot understand why I'm so angry.

I have no idea now where the rest of the story came from, the stuff where the murdered woman is actually a Goddess who is reborn periodically by means of the rest of Her triad of Goddesses, but it started with this dream. And, as with "First Breath," a lot of time has gone by since the dream and the original conception of the story. It will be fascinating to see what years of unconscious back-burner time has done to it.

So that's where I'm at this morning. Also, I intend to blog about my happy shiny World Con / Renovation experience. More than a week late. STAY TUNED.

It's a sunny afternoon in Boulder. I'm at Aspen Leaf Frozen Yogurt, sitting at a counter that faces out the window into the parking lot. Cars roll by. Past the lot, Table Mesa Boulevard makes its final stretch west into the foothills and the neighborhood where I envision "Heroes to Believe in" taking place. (And how long has it been since that's been in the slush? Note to self...)

Things are peaceful. I am currently allowing myself what Havi Brooks calls "Island Time." Havi Brooks is an amazing inspiring blogger and you should read her stuff now. Or, well, whenever you get around to it really. No pressure. Your call.

It's been a Day Full of Stuff, which followed a Partial Week Full of Stuff, a Partial Week being all that's left when you're freshly back in town after a weekend at Gen Con. You know how it goes. First, the train is supposed to get back into Denver early on Monday morning, the better to leap back into Life As Usual. But what with the flooding in Nebraska reducing the BNSF to a single railway over which everyone proceeds single file, we didn't actually pull into the station until about 1:00 PM. And the Flat Niki Stage of Recovery stretched into Tuesday. So.

The Amazing Diaper Cat, Null, got a room to himself and his undiapered butt, so my job Wednesday was to Wash All The Things. This involved many journeys up and down the stairs so as to catch the washer at just the right time to toss in a quarter cup of Simple Solution Oxy Formula, which really does make the cat piss stench go away but is not optimized for use by the laundry load. I washed two loads and called it good.

Also, it's been hot enough in our house that guests need to sign a waiver indemnifying us against liability for their heat stroke, so it also fell to me to investigate replacing our air conditioner wall unit. Made the call Tuesday, met the HomeSmart representatives Wednesday, will have a new unit in the wall Friday. After more than a decade of this inefficient, dying, energy-sucking and stingy-with-the-cool-air refrigeration unit, we will have a new A/C box in the wall. I'm not sure I'll be able to take responsibility for whatever crazy impulsive things my unmitigated joy prompts me to do.

Today, Null went to the vet for Acupuncture Experiment #4. After this, we have to make the call: has it being doing him any good? Well... Maybe? He seems to be walking better and dripping less. He goes without a diaper again, because we find "helping" him at the litter box every few hours seems to erase most accident potential. He sleeps on the bed without leaving wet spots. But is any of this due to the acupuncture, or was it already the case if we'd shucked off the diaper sooner? Is he really walking better, or am I talking myself into seeing it? I... don't know. I'll be keeping an eye out for him.

Also, I made phone calls and decisions. Saturday, our old table and our old TV will find new homes at, respectively, Joyful Furniture and Ares Thrift. In the spirit of getting rid of unused things, I cleaned out my stationery drawer of empty or near-empty ink bottles.

So. As stated above: A Partial Week Full of Stuff. But have I been writing?

Well. I've been doing my Examiner posts and thinking really hard about getting back to other long-deferred writing tasks. I filed "Blackbird"'s latest rejection letter and decided where I'll send it next, which I'll do... tomorrow. And, figuratively out of breath from all the other stuff I've been doing, I've been smacking myself with guilt for not getting more done.

Did I mention Havi Brooks?

In my Internet travels, which get more ecclectic the deeper my avoidance cycle dips, I came across a link to Havi's "Bite Me, National Anti-Procrastination Day." I clicked it, thinking I'd read a screed about having One Big Day A Year defeats the purpose because us marathon procrastinators will use it as an excuse to put things off until said Day.

No. That is not what I read.

What I read was some of the wisest, kindest, most compassionate writing on the subject of procrastination. Just... beautiful stuff. Stuff that made the part of me that's sick of getting kicked by the other part of me feel acknowledged, spoken to, valued. And in was more than that -- when Havi writes from her own experience of procrastination and the effects that well-meaning but ineffective advice can have, it's like reading my own diary. If I kept a diary. If I was anywhere near as self-aware.

Or what about this charming quote on procrastination from another “expert” who wants to terrify you into taking action?

"Understand that this enemy is working diligently, 24 hours a day, to prevent any forward progress, so you must work even more diligently at eradicating it from your life."

Lovely. Thanks. Now I totally want to go get a bunch of stuff done. Oh, no I don’t. I want to curl up in a ball and cry.

...

I work with people who have these issues. People who have big, wonderful things to do in the world and are really, really scared sometimes to put it out there. Or even to talk about putting it out there.

I love these people with all my heart. They’re smart, creative and just generally awesome.

And then these so-called experts show up with their war-mongering and guilt-mongering and an entire day devoted to telling my people how much they suck. And it’s all so well-intentioned!

But it doesn’t help them. It makes them feel worse. They withdraw and retreat deeper into the stuff (guilt, criticism and self-loathing) that’s most harmful for them.

I’m here trying to help people who are traumatized by shoulds learn how to motivate themselves with love and attention. And this stuff freaks them out.

What about all the people who totally need help and aren’t getting it because they’re scared? Because they think it might make them feel guilty and horrible about themselves. Because they think they’ve tried what’s out there and know for a fact that nothing can help.

Well, I hope that everyone knows that not all methods involve kicking yourself and hating yourself. Because ohhhhhhh, that’s just got to hurt.

It does. It hurts a lot. Gods, it's good to read someone who gets that.

See, about half of any given Morning Pages session reads like this: "Here is stuff I gotta do today. [LONG LIST] And I'm gonna do it! Every bit of it! Except there's so much I didn't do yesterday. And I'm afraid if I don't do it today it means I'm worthless. I need to stop beating myself up. Why does even writing a to-do list feel like beating myself up?" And so forth and so on and variations on a theme.

So I just started devouring Havi's blog yesteday. Well, I collected all the Favorite Post type links into Scrapbook so I could read them offline at my leisure. I have another train trip coming up (anyone else going to World Con / Renovation?) and I could use the reading material.

Today I started dipping into it while between tasks. My fingers hurt and I was sick of being vertical, so I took the laptop with me for a lie-down and I read...

Is it scary to talk to your fear? To even acknowledge its shadowy presence in the room? Absolutely. I'm sorry. Hug.

And, Gods help me, I just wept.

Maybe I'm just a sap. I dunno. But reading this stuff has alternately got me energized and allowed me a measure of peace. It also makes me wish I could drop everything along with an extra $600 and run away to Portland for one of Havi's "Rallies," because, dude, blanket forts. I'm not quite ready to order her Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic, mostly because I've been spending a lot of money this summer already and I'm rather behind on my money-making endeavors, but I would be really tempted if the eBook were available singly. So I continue reading bits and pieces in my breaks-between tasks, and I'm not going to pressure myself to OMG GET JUST ONE MORE THING DONE TONIGHT! but instead I'm going to eat the last few spoonfuls of my frozen yogurt with cookie dough and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and I'm going to watch the light change across the windshields of a hundred parked cars, and I'm going to give John a big smile when he arrives to pick me up and we head to the pizza place for dinner and Spiral Knights. And I'm going to have fun.

And tomorrow I'm going to get things done because each thing is a joy to accomplish, not because I feel guilty.

Well. That's the theory. It'll take practice to put it into practice.

You know, I don't actually like frozen yogurt. Under the freeze, it's still yogurt. It's still got that sour tang that sets my tongue on edge. But I tried it, and I had a wonderful afternoon here. Isn't that weird?

John's here. Gotta go. Hugs!

...roughly in order of actual writing-related relevance.

Firstly. Had the pleasure of seeing myself referred to, for the first time, in a Real Review of Actually Published Stuff, as a "newcomer." Like one's first lumpy handspun yarn, this is to be cherished. Only about 100 times more so. Again, I can't think of better company in which "First Breath" could see the light of print. This is amazing.

Relevant to this: Blood and Other Cravings is slated for release on September 13 of this year. It's available now for pre-order at all your favorite online and brick-and-mortar localities. I've presented here a link to do so at IndieBound.org, who help you place orders at your neighborhood independent bookstore if you're fortunate enough to have one.

Secondly, I've finally put "Blackbird" back into the slush. I'm slightly unnerved by Apex Magazine's insistence that submissions be done through HeyPublisher.com, referred to hereafter as "HP". (This should be unambiguous since I am not going to discuss boy wizards nor printer manufacturers in this post.) I can't submit a cover letter unless it's part of the manuscript; alas that I didn't think to prepend one. I can, however, enter a bio that will be attached to every darn thing I submit via HP -- which just feels weird. Also, in order to submit, I had to upload my manuscript to HP, which is worrisome even considering HP's reassuring privacy clause. Still, Apex specifically want dark fantasy, which this is, and Apex pay pro rates, which option I should like to exhaust before moving down the publishing hierarchy.

I'd have tried Strange Horizons first, but they have a list of horror tropes they really would not like to see again, at least not unless the manuscript is effin' fantastic, and I see "Blackbird" in at least three of those listed items. Which, despite SH wanting to see "stories that have some literary depth but aren't boring; styles that are unusual yet readable; structures that balance inventiveness with traditional narrative," is daunting. So... well, maybe later. Maybe a few rejection letters down the road.

Thirdly and similarly, I'm looking for other places that might like to reprint "Right Door, Wrong Time." Brain Harvest seems like a good fit. When I took a look Saturday, the most recent story was Helena Bell's "Please Return My Son Who Is In Your Custody," which, wow. Chills and shivers and a few uneasy giggles. I still need to read the latest since then, Simon Kewin's "Terahertz." The first few paragraphs tantalize me with their efficient worldbuilding.

Nextly, I've begun play-testing Glitch. Glitch is a very strange, and strangely compelling, MMO. You play the part of a figment of the Gods' (called "Giants") imagination. You learn skills, you do stuff. You interact with other people. You help build the world. Play-test opens again tomorrow, so I hear. What does this have to do with writing? Well, it's a reason why I might not be getting a lot of writing done. (Stupid online game addictions. I can has them. In multiples.) If you also are playing, I'm "vortexae".

And lastly (for this post at least), I am baking pound cake. I had this quart jar of whipping cream that self-soured, and pound cake calls for sour cream. So there.

And what does that have to do with writing? You ask a writer who's ready for dessert.

Actually, I can loop that back into writing. When I get done baking it, if the timing works out I shall take it over to our neighbors' place to share. John's over there with Kit and Austin of Transneptune Games, play-testing Becoming Heroes with some friends. Becoming Heroes is available for ordering right now this minute! Nothing "pre" about that. And if you go to Gen Con Indy this year, you can visit Transneptune Games at their vendor booth and buy it there from the team that made it happen.

I'm really proud of these guys and of the book they've produced, and not just because one of them's my husband. And not just because one of the copy-editors was me. (Gods help me, I'm a copy-editor.) And not just because Alison McCarthy's illustrations are stunning. And not just because the game draws on such a multifarious palette of literary influences. I'm proud of them and this book for all these things, plus because creating a new game and putting it out there for public consumption is an amazing feat to take from concept to fulfillment. And it's something John has always wanted to do, for as long as I've known him, so I'm especially pleased for him on that account.

And it's a dang good game, too. The team has put a lot of thought into it -- heck, they put a lot of thought into games as a category. You should read their blog. You won't take RPG mechanics or RPG terminology for granted ever again, that's for sure.

So Transneptune Games sold their first copies of Becoming Heroes about the same time I saw that Publisher's Weekly review of Blood and Other Cravings, which parallelism really amuses me. Hooray!

And that's the list of Things What I Wanted To Tell You What With Not Blogging Reliably Of Late. Which hopefully will improve in the near future.

The movie Super 8 opens with a long interior shot of a steel mill, and the camera swings in to focus on the big green sign hanging above the workers and the machines. Every assembly line and production factory has one. There's the name and logo of the company in the upper left, and in the upper right a slogan conveying the company's ostensible concern for workplace safety. In the lower right, there are five big spaces with hooks at the top. The three right-most hooks are occupied with digits denoting how many days it's been since the last employee accident: 784.

The camera's slow movement comes to a stop with the sign filling the entire screen just as a man finishes ascending a ladder. Without any expression, he takes the cards reading 7 and 8 and 4 off of their hooks.

He hangs up a card that says 1.

Then he descends the ladder.

Just one scene. Not a word spoken. Just a single, simple action that goes straight to the audience's heart, because with it we know, without any fuss or emotive acting, that someone died yesterday. We also know that we're going to be in very good hands for the next two hours.

That's not "front line" as in battlefield. That's "front line" like "front of house," the place in the dining establishment where staff interface with customers. (Although back in my days working the university cafeteria, there always seemed to be a certain parallel between the two senses of the phrase.) The back of house is where the stories get cooked up; the front is where they get offered for sale. I was going to use the battlefield metaphor, but I couldn't decide whether my latest rejected stories had come back with their shields or on them. Then I decided war was not the answer. Go with the restaurant metaphor: two potential diners decided the current menu was not to their liking.

"Door" is still looking for a place to get reprinted. PodCastle says short-shorts have been hard to sell. And "Blackbird" has garnered its second rejection letter; it's not quite right for Weird Tales. So there you go. I'd think of new places to send them, but it's rather late tonight and my brain is mush.

I have about enough energy to say this much on the subject of rejection letters:

This newfangled world of electronic submissions makes it hard sometimes to tell whether a rejection is a form letter or a personal note. Compose a sentence by hand or paste it in; the pixels look the same. And, more importantly, Dear Writer, however the sentences got into the letter, they were most likely chosen for you to receive. Don't read anything into a rejection letter that isn't there -- that way lies madness -- but take seriously those things that are. If the rejection letter compliments your story, then by all means enjoy the warm fuzzy glow. And if the phrase "try us again with something else" is included, take them at their word.

The world is full of disappointment and discouragement. If something even remotely looks like encouragement, take it as such.

So. End of Deep Thoughts. Now: Thinking about what next to try Weird Tales with, and where next to try "Blackbird." And also, where Writing The Next Thing is concerned, what the Next Thing might be.

These are good thoughts to feed to a sleepy brain. A well-fed sleepy brain means a helpful dreamy brain.

It started out in Nebraska, for one thing. I was riding the California Zephyr from Chicago to Denver, and it crossed the state line sometime around 5:00 AM or so. I'm not sure if I was awake for that. I know I woke up several times through the night to see the moon, just past full, shining in on me. Then the sun was rising and my seatmate said, "It was 6:15 a moment ago; now it's 5:30." "Oh," I said, rubbing my eyes, "we must have crossed into Colorado."

I put on my shoes, went downstairs to replace my morning breath with minty toothpaste breath, and went back one car in search of means to replace that with coffee breath. The lounge car had just opened for service and the line stretched up the stairs and halfway through the sightseer deck, so I put off coffee 'til later. Open up laptop and write story now.

I was on tap for story critique for my twice-monthly Wednesday group. It would have met tomorrow, but since not enough RSVPs were received it got canceled. But I didn't know that would happen, so I was slightly panicking. I wanted to email that story the moment I got home. I didn't have much time.

That's the thing with new stories. I can work them over in my head as much as I'd like, but they don't really come out until they come out. Of course, the sooner I start writing the first scene, the sooner I'll know how the second scene goes, and so forth, but I swear I wrote and rewrote the first scene several times and had no clue. Really, the story wasn't actually there to be written the way it ought to be written until I realized that the beginning catalyst and the climax mechanism, if related, would make each other less contrived and the story more efficient. And that didn't happen until sometime Thursday.

Would it have happened sooner if I'd spent more time thinking about it sooner? I don't know. The person I was Thursday is not identical to the person I was Wednesday, or the week before. Maybe the person I was the week before couldn't have figured out what the person I was Friday afternoon on the train needed to know to start churning out scene after scene at last.

Because that's mainly what I did Friday on the train. I also knitted a good deal of sock, read the first chapter of Orphans of Chaos (a free Tor.com download for the site's registered beta users from a couple years ago), and wrote up an article for Demand Studios using web pages I'd Scrapbooked earlier for research. But mainly I wrote the story's first real draft.

Writing a story draft when I only have some 24 hours to do it in is panic-inducing. Every scene I get done, I can't help but think how many more scenes I have to go; and every scene I've written seems to require that the story be at least one scene longer than I'd originally planned. I kept checking my word count and despairing at the realization that it was already 2500 words, already 4000 words.

This, unfortunately, makes for a first draft whose pace gets more and more rushed as the story goes on. But I'm not allowed to fix it just yet. I already mailed it out for critique. It really bugs me when someone responds to comments on his or her story with "Oh, don't worry about that, I've fixed that since, it's totally different now." Might as well just add "Those hours you spent in good faith critiquing my story? Totally wasted. Sorry 'bout that!" I don't know if that bugs other people as much as it bugs me, but I'm not going to do that to anyone else. So I'm not allowed to reread or edit this story until after June 8, which is when my critique was rescheduled for.

So the train arrived and I got home thanks to my terribly sick husband, who peeled himself out of bed long enough to drive down to the Table Mesa Park 'n Ride where the regional bus dropped me off. He went back to bed with my profuse thanks. And I hit the desk to finish writing this dang story.

And I emailed it off.

And promptly regretted it.

It's really pathetic how all it takes to make me insecure about my writing is for me to put it in front of other peoples' eyes. I just have to remind myself that this is how I felt after emailing an early draft of "First Breath," too -- and you know how well that went. (Really well. The anthology it's in will be on bookstore shelves come September 13. I have the PDF of the proof copy right here on my personal hard drive. With a table of contents with my name in them. And Ellen Datlow reports that the galleys are going to Book Expo with her for autograph events scheduled for tomorrow and Thursday. I didn't know galleys went to autographing events. People will see them! People in public! Can I stop hyperventilating now?) Which is not to say this new story is going to be all that and a bag of chips, of course, but it does help remind me that my insecurity isn't an accurate reflection of reality.

So. Story draft done and emailed out. After which, I and five friends drove down to NoNo's Cafe and ate rather a lot of crawfish. Then there were cats to feed, ice cream to purchase, and several episodes of Doctor Who to watch. Also the new My Little Pony cartoons, which, in the capable hands of Lauren Faust (Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Powerpuff Girls), are rather more fun than Hasbro's first go-round.

Conveniently, the world did not go all to pieces at 6:00 PM, so there was nothing stopping us watching cartoons until we were falling-down sleepy.

And that's what I did Sunday.

But oh hey wait not done yet! So. I have this really good friend from high school, right, he actually reads my blog and stuff, he says to me over lunch in Metairie last week, "So when do we get to see more chapters?" And he's right -- I should be posting excerpts more often. So here's the first few paragraphs of my brand new short story draft, which is provisionally titled "The Interfaith Intercessional Fellowship Meets Saturdays at Seven," and is very likely still full of The Suck but hey, it's down in writing now. Ya gotta start somewhere.

Janice Claire joined the cult because, having nothing else to do with her Saturday night, she had no good way to tell Madeline no.

Not that she hadn't tried. "But I don't really believe in prayer," she'd said. "I mean, I hope like anything for the best, but -- I'm not very religious," she finished uncomfortably.

"Oh, that's OK. A lot of people in the group don't pray." Not that Madeline had said please come join our cult. What she'd actually suggested was that Janice Claire accompany her to her prayer group. "It's OK to just hope. Just knowing you're there -- you've given me so much support already, I don't know what I'd do without you."

Not for the first time Janice Claire regretted having opened her mouth. "So much support" had in fact consisted of her mumbling something sympathetic early last week when Madeline had checked her daughter into room 301, bed B. It seemed to be the thing to do. The twelve-year-old had been in and out of consciousness since then, mostly out. No diagnosis had yet surfaced. Janice Claire hadn't been the only one in the records department to express sympathies, but Madeline responded with such an urgently grateful look that she knew it was Uncle Morris's barbecue ribs all over again. Really, she'd known better. Talking to people only got her in trouble. That was precisely why Janice Claire preferred to spend her Saturday evenings in bed with a book.

Ta-da! And that excerpt includes the correction of a major typo that made it out to everyone in the group on Saturday. Dammit. Well. HEY GROUP! Just sort of mentally insert Madeline's name in the sentence that doesn't parse. Where it goes "but responded with," like that. (Sheesh.) Also, it occurs to me that I meant to rename the uncle at some point because naming antagonists after actual real family members sort of sends the wrong message. (I'm sorry! It was automatic! I was in Don't Think Just Write mode! I was visualizing the usual Weilbaecher Family Thanksgiving Dinner, and the name of the annual host of the festivities just dropped in there along with the floor plan of his kitchen! I didn't mean nothing by it! I also didn't mean anything by it!)

And I'm going to stop thinking about this now, OK?

I do not habitually buy lottery tickets. In fact, I don't buy lottery tickets. Pretty much ever.

Once upon a time, John and I were driving down a highway in West Texas, looking for a place to spend the night. No hotels were forthcoming. We took an exit out of sheer hope and found ourselves driving down a significantly smaller highway with no end in sight. Nor light. We passed a sign that said CATTLE IN ROAD. We started wondering if we were not on a highway at all.

John said, "I really hope we don't get shot." (Have I told this story before?)

I said, "Don't say that! Don't even say a thing like that!" He looked surprised, and a little hurt, and a lot confused. I dialed it back and tried to explain. "I just feel like, saying a thing makes it more likely to happen. I'm not comfortable giving voice to the things I don't want to happen."

He nodded. There was silence for a moment while we got the car turned around and headed back for the honest-to-goodness interstate highway. Finally, John said, brightly, "Gee, I hope we don't win the lottery..."

But of course neither of us buys lottery tickets. We do, however, play in other lottery-like things. John is going to Gen Con this year as, for the first time, a vendor; he and some close friends have been designing role-playing game systems. They're going to show one of 'em off. And as for me, well, I submit short stories in hopes of finding people willing to pay me for the right to publish 'em.

It's a lot like the lottery in some ways. Well, it's a lot unlike the lottery. Regardless of what some cynics will tell you about either industry, neither game nor fiction publication are matters of pure chance. Quality comes into it. Once you reach a certain level of quality, then we can talk about chance: getting the story in front of the right editor, making the connection with the right game publishers, etc. But you can't get a chance until you've got a product of sufficient quality to be worth putting in front of the potential customer. And you don't stand a chance getting it in front of the right editor/publisher/agent until you've done sufficient homework to aim for one who's a good fit with what you're selling. And you don't just buy a ticket to play; you have to make the ticket yourself, out of star dust and unicorn tears. Seriously. Also blood and sweat and time and patience and more blood and sweat and time.

But it's just like the lottery in that you can't win if you don't play.

It occurs to me that of late I have been playing only very rarely, and this may have something to do with the slow rate of publication I've been experiencing. "I have this crazy theory..."

And it also occurs to me that it was very pleasant to report a certain amount of money for "sale of short fiction" on the portion of our household income taxes described as Income Not Reported Anywhere Else. I should like to do more of that, please.

Hence more submitting.

"Right Door, Wrong Time" is on its way to, possibly, a new home. Its previous home vanished from the internet sometime early last year; the small press Twilight Tales and their website TwilightTales.com would appear to be no more. I'd like to get it out there again, so into the slush it goes.

So I didn't actually announce that "Blackbird" didn't actually sell, right? "Blackbird" got the most adorable form rejection letter ever. Of course, invite-only anthologies mean that "form rejection" takes on a different meaning. It's not like an ongoing quarterly magazine with its dreaded "Did not meet our needs at this time." In this case, a limited amount of people were getting it, all at once, and it was written specifically for this instance, and it was hand-pasted into the body of individual replies to individual submission emails. So. That said, the copy that got pasted was adorable. It also made me grin and look forward to submitting to this editor's next anthology.

Today, I failed to get any new work done on the fiction queue, but I did manage to update my manuscript submissions database. This meant grabbing dates from various emails, and also doing more than a few direct database inserts and lookups via PHPMyAdmin because I never got around to building certain of the key web forms that would make it simple. Yeah, I write my own PHP/MySQL widgets (this blog, for instance -- there's a reason it doesn't look like Wordpress or Typepad). They aren't very well-written widgets. I bought an O'Reilly book that's supposed to help me write better widgets, but first I have to read the book. Meanwhile, I can add a new market or a new manuscript from my Super Sekret Website (Memberz Only), but if I want to juxtapose them interestingly, I have to clamber backstage and futz with the tables directly. For now. Until I get off my butt and fix things.

So. The Feb 15 email submission of "Blackbird" got logged along with the Mar 11 rejection letter in the Correspondence Log table, right after I added the entry for the anthology in the Markets table and the entry for the submission itself (defined as "intersection of this manuscript and that market) in the Submissions table. My table relations, let me show you them! Then I had to go back and add the rejection letter for "Lambing Season" from another anthology last year. Then I clicked "Show stuff in slush," knowing full well I had nothing in slush; when something came up, I had to locate and correct the orphaned Correspondence Log entry.

All of which left me with, like I said, absolutely zero in the slush. We had to fix that.

"Blackbird" has been kicked off the couch with instructions to "get off your lazy bum and get a job or something, I dunno, you can buy your own damn canned herring, these are mine. Especially the herring in cabernet sauce, you try taking those and you pull back a stump, my lad." So the story took the hint and slushed its happy ass out the door.

And then I logged the submission, both here and over at Duotrope, because for once I was submitting not to an anthology but to a magazine, so I could actually pull the market's name out of Duotrope's search engine.

Tomorrow I may be very ambitious and show a couple more manuscripts the slush treatment. Also, I may actually get some work done toward something else being submittable.

Only, I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but, what's up with 70% of all surveyed pro markets, and some semi-pro too, being closed until May? I mean, I knew the industry was smaller than it looked, but damn. Them's some serious cahoots there, y'all.