In Which They Loff Our Heroine, Even Though She Doesn't Know What She's Talking About

7 January 2004

They loff me! They really loff me!

Fortean Bureau is buying "Seven Minutes In Heaven." La la la, yay! Much better than Monday. (In fact, when I got the acceptance last night, I ran away from the computer so as not to have to deal with anything else to close off my day.)

"They buys our story, precious," I told Mark, enumerating how it is clear that they loff me, "and they gives us a Stella, and then they buys our story again." I paused. "They don't have to give us another Stella, though. One is good." "It sounds like Stella could use another Stella," Mark pointed out, and this is true: the duplicate Stella could work long hours while the original read books and played with Roo and had coffee with me and so on. So any duplicate Stellas will be donated to Stella.

I haven't submitted very many stories to Fortean, truthfully; I keep being scared by the "weird." Maybe I'm not weird enough, I keep thinking. Apparently, I am weird enough. Yay! I waffle between "Oh, this next story won't be weird enough" and "I am the freakazoid queen! I will write only lovely strange stories and they will loff and loff me!"

I might not have been so much with the loffing if it hadn't been for Hannah. Otherwise it might have been loving. Who knows.

But it sure beats nine rejections.

The furnace man (not heater, my mom informs me) showed up three hours sooner than he said he would, and our house never dropped below 60F on one of the coldest days of the year. Rah house and rah furnace man. Our blower was broken. Also we now know that our water heater is leaking. Luckily, we have a homeowners' warranty, so these things are not out of our pocketses.

I've been working on "The Beast's Apprentice" off and on for months now. I have the disappearing outline method, as I usually do: scenes are noted in the place where they ought to be, and as they appear there, I erase the notes. I know all the scenes in this story. I know how it goes. Yesterday I just sat down and filled in several scenes. With the Not The Moose Book, too, I've been doing that this week. I know what to do, and I've been doing it.

The danger here is one simple, very wrong statement: "Well, I could have done that before!"

Clearly not.

It's much more fun to write lots of flowing scenes than to sit and scowl at the screen and type a very few words at a time. If I could have done this before, I would have. But I can now, so I will.

I'm in a good mood today.

After I got my back fixed, I exchanged duplicate presents at Best Buy and came home with Galaxy Quest, Kiki's Delivery Service, and the new Sarah McLachlan album. I kept spotting other people who were bigger walking stereotypes than me, so I didn't feel quite so bad about my purchases being so...demographic. Then I got a wedding present for someone who has been known to read this journal, and while it wasn't part of the stereotype, it...filled it out, shall we say; it didn't clash with it at all. Then I went and bought pants.

Apparently, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I had been chirping away blithely about these khaki corduroys available at Nordstrom's. To those in the know, I had chirped that they were Polo size 4s. Heh. Funny thing about that. I walked into Nordstrom's to find these pants. It was clearly the wrong store. I rolled my eyes at myself, figured out that I had been in Macy's (we don't like Sears or Bloomie's), and set off for the right store. Where they had Polo size 4 khaki cords for $60. Ummm. This was perhaps not the price tag I had hoped for, but there was a yellow Post-It note on the rack, so I grabbed them to try them on, figuring if they fit flawlessly, we'd see if the Post-It meant something good. On my way to the fitting room, I spotted some Hilfiger size 2 khaki cords on the 65% off rack. Grabbed them and took them into the fitting room with me. Lo and behold, oh my oh my, they fit better than the Polo 4s. Were a better color of khaki. Were cheaper, much.

Well all right then. Not knowing what I'm doing is apparently sometimes a good thing. These pants aren't perfect (they do That Thing, Karina), but they're pretty soft, warm, mostly comfy, the right color, the right price...these were the right pants.

So I sold a story and bought good stuff and wrote well. And today, I will hope to write well, and the others can follow or not, however it turns out. My momma said it would be a better day, so that's what I'm counting on.

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