Day in the Life of an Idiot

For Shawn's birthday this year, my mom got the most PERFECT card. It shows a woman dumping left-over food into the trash and her dialogue bubble says, "La-la-la-la, I'm throwing my vegetables away and no one can stop me!" The inside reads, "There are some perks to growing older."

That's just funny, but the truth is Shawn hates most veggies, so it's even FUNNIER.

I feel like that when I wake up at 2 o'clock am with a nagging sense that there's "stuff to be done!" I'm at the age now where I think, "Ah, hell, I'll just get up and see if I can figure out what it is..." Apparently, the dishes needed doing, so I did those. Then, I needed to finally write back to my parents because, despite the ease of social media, I've apparently forgotten how to write a simple e-mail letter and am terribly behind on familial correspondence. So, I did that.

The next thing on my list is to check to see when I promised the Loft that I would write a blog promoting my up-coming classes. This is the year I teach ALL THE THINGS in the summer. If all three courses fill-up, I have two youth classes I'll be teaching: 'ALL THE FEELS: FanFic 101' and 'MORE THAN THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE: Writing SF/F.' I also agreed to try another on-line class for adults teaching SF, called 'OVER THE TRANSOM: An Intermediate Course for SF/F Writers.' I'm looking forward to them all, but I really, really hope my fanfic class fills, because it would be the great vindication of my life if I could find a way to make a legitimate living from fanfic.

I mentioned the fanfic class at Detour and had tons of people come up afterwards and ask me about it. It's really a shame that I didn't get my act together enough to offer an adult version of that class for next semester. I guess someone is doing a fanfic class for adults though on the theme of 50 SHADES OF FANFIC, so maybe people will try that out. I don't know if that's written by an insider, though, you know what I mean?

Today is Wednesday, so when it's finally a decent hour, I'll be meeting with the Women of Wyrdsmiths for our usual Wednesday gathering. I've been working on another set of sample chapters. I ended up having to set aside Mars for the moment because it started to veer off my synopsis. Normally, that's a GOOD sign, but the editor who's shown interest in the Mars book is the one who rejected Samurai High for a number of reasons, but specifically because it didn't jibe with the proposal. So, that's made me a little gun shy about my usual process of just writing my way into a book until it finds its sea legs, as it were. I decided the best course of action would be to set Mars aside for the moment and come back to it with a fresh pair of eyes in a little while to see if I can wrestle it back on track or if I should just go where it takes me. In the meantime, I've switched to ANOTHER sample chapter project for a completely different editor. This project is one that my friend empty_mirrors calls DSL, which stands for "Deep Space Lawyer." This seems to have been a good move on my part, because I woke up several days ago with a zinger opening line and have been on a bit of a roll. I've been looking for a project that will carry me, and DSL might be it. That is to say, this might be the book I just write from start to finish.

My last Wyrdsmiths meeting was kind of rough, though, because I'd handed out part of the Mars project weeks earlier knowing full well that it wasn't working. Even being prepared for the critique, it was surprisingly disheartening to hear just how much it failed. I've been feeling lately like, despite writing every day, I've forgotten a lot of the basics of original fiction writing. That's probably not true/unfair and more a product of NOT SELLING. But it becomes a kind of vicious circle: it becomes mentally harder to get into OF writing the longer I'm without a contract.

And, I will tell you that getting up at 2 am has its perks, but opening my email to a rejection from a short story anthology is not one of them. I'd sent out "Van Buelyn Effect," my time travel couch story to a place looking for time-travel reprints, and got a very nice, professional "alas, does not suit our needs at this time" rejection. I can't really feel bad about not placing in this anthology because a) it was a long-shot to start with, and b) the couch story already sold once... this was for reprints only.

So, here I am at... well, now 3 am, trying to not feel like a loser.

I need to remind myself that there's good news on the horizon. I heard from my British e-book publisher, Wizard's Tower Press, that Fallen Host is in its final round of editing/clean-up and will very likely be out and available for purchase in a matter of days. Interestingly, when my family and I were at HalfPrice Books yesterday I stumbled across a pristine hard copy of Fallen Host. It didn't even have my signature in it (which is especially rare locally.) So, I bought it. It's going to go into a secret stash, for those times when I might like to give away a complete set of the old books.

And, they saw me coming at HPB... I went downstairs to start flipping through the one shelf they reserve for Shonen Jump, and, dang if the manager didn't run to the back room and haul out the rest of the Jumps they had in storage and lay them at my feet. I did walk off with half of them, so apparently that was a good move. I might have to take a photo of my haul again. All I have to say is: "color inserts." I swear to god they're easily worth the dollar I paid for them. Plus, last night I read a really cool Naurto short story that was apparently the original one-shot that launched the series (though it's VERY different, Naurto is a full-on kitsune/yoaki and has the power to shape-shift.)

Mason, meanwhile, walked off with almost 70 bucks in books.

Lucky kid.