Somewhat Subdued

12 October 2001

Last night we drove up to Marin and had dinner at Timprov's aunt and uncle's place. It's a really, really good thing that I don't live in their house, because I'd never get anything done. I'd just look out the window, day and night. They have a spectacular view. The rest of the house is darn cool as well, and it suits them quite well. Timprov's cousin Kelly and his girlfriend Cherise were visiting, so we got to meet them.

I don't think we should go to Mill Valley right after we've been in Minneapolis, though, because it reinforces the fact that, yes, in real people time, it did take forever to get there. Still worth it, though.

I had two big accomplishments yesterday: getting groceries and getting the tutoring program to work, finally. Wooohoo. The other stuff was just little stuff, jotting down ideas for a new short story, random work on the Not The Moose Book, that kind of thing. Sending out stories -- while we were gone, I got three rejections. Two of them said the story wasn't long enough. The two stories that were not long enough were 640 words and 6000 words, respectively. And someone suggested that the 6000 word story should be a novel.

That's what I need: more novel ideas.

I've started marking stories in red in my send-outs log when they've been gone for six months. I don't think I'm out of line to say that this is a bit unreasonable for short story markets. Do people who have this backlog ever intend to get caught up? And if so, how? None of the places that have had my stories for more than six months have closed to submissions, which seems like one way to handle it. (And lest I get e-mails from older, wiser writers telling me that I can query now: I have queried on three of them, with no response. The fourth is at Realms of Fantasy; you tell me whether they're going to answer a query.) Sometimes I just don't understand the state of the genre, or more accurately, the state of the publishers.

Ah well. I've been putting the rest of the pictures up from the Minnesota trip. If you missed them, they start here; there's new stuff today.

I think that's all for now. I need to get my books unpacked and get some work set up for this morning for when I'm tutoring. Saturday late afternoon/early evening is going to be time to celebrate sending out Reprogramming. I'm really sorry that some of you can't make it, but any time you try to schedule something with more than one household worth of people, conflicts abound. If any of you feel like going out for coffee or something anyway, let me know....

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