Squirrel!

By the way, the title of this post is a reference to the movie UP! If you haven't seen it you are missing out. Anyway, I feel like a squirrel getting ready for winter. I have been running around doing just about everything but writing. Sure I have done some edits and actually I wrote a query letter yesterday that (after countless drafts) I am proud to say is mine, but my word count on actual stories has been zilch lately. This morning, before the boy woke, I managed to pound out 600 words and felt pretty good about it.

The rest of my days have been spent running around, trying to potty train my boy, and working on the yard, trying to get it into decent shape before winter sets in. I figure the better it looks now the less work I have in the spring, when all of my good intentions turn into summer and then fall again.

In good news there is a really good book trailer going around the web today for Barry Napier's collection, DEBRIS. The book will be coming out sometime in the next month. Also, 52 Stitches is out on Amazon. I look forward to reading all of my favorite stories and reading a few I may have missed as the weeks seemed to fly by this year.

Hopefully it will be a productive weekend and this next week will get more words out that this week has. Until later.

If I kill off the weeds i just have a patch of dirt for a yard

The title of this post has nothing to do with anything, although it is true.

Today will be an interesting day. I have stories to read, pages to fill and a child to bathe. Not all at the same time, the pages would get soggy and I would probably short out my computer. I also have a lunch with another local writer and her boyfriend. Should be interesting, especially if my boy doesn't want to cooperate. She writes YA and is a reporter for the local paper. I know somewhere in this little town of ours is a Harlequin romance writer as well. I don't know who she is but she writes under a pseudonym that I am unsure of. I am a little rusty on my Harlequin's.

Yesterday, in a sleepy stupor I managed to get no writing done. I did read a bit, which was nice and started to watch the history channel program I had taped from Sunday night 'How Bruce Lee Changed the World.' Very interesting so far, I would recommend it.

Have plenty to do today, so I am going to do them now and if you are interested in queries go to Carrie's page. She has played with one of Mercedes' query letters and it is a good time.

Worth looking into

I sent off my story to Dead Bait and got a nice little acknowledgment letter back promptly. I thought about it a minute, checked my records and realized I didn't received any such thing for the 2012 AD story I had sent out last week. I wrote the editor and asked if he had received it. He had not. I was glad I asked. I promptly resent it and got a nice little acknowledgment letter. This is the second time this week where I have had to ask an editor the where abouts of a story and the second time I have gotten news that it was a) with an editor that was no longer with them or b) it hadn't made it there at all. What are the chances.

As I was saying. I did go over my Dead Bait piece yesterday. It read better than I thought it might. I changed a few lines, changed some words and some verb tense re-read it, changed some more things, re-read that and sent it off. I hope it doesn't suck. I really like the ending. I don't know what I will work on today. I think I have most of my short stories out of me for the moment but I am not 100 percent sure.

It made it down to -24 below last night (that is Fahrenheit) but by the time I had to take my daughter out to meet the bus it was 0. It almost felt warm. Almost. Speaking of my daughter, she lost her first tooth last night. The tooth fairy is much nicer than she was when I was a kid. I didn't realize inflation had gone up that much, either that or I got the cheap tooth fairy.