In the middle of the insanity of the last couple of weeks, I caved to peer pressure and got a Facebook account.  So if you're there, drop me a line!

Regulaarly scheduled blogging should resume at some point in the next week or so!

I've nearly finished reading Gardner Dozois's "Best of the Best" antho (a selection of Science Fiction from his best of the year anthos) and I find myself scratching my head at a few of the selections.  Actually, I was mostly in agreement with the stuff from the eighties and early nineties (and, of course with Ted Chiang's "Story of your Life", which, if you haven't already done so, you owe it to yourself to read), but the late nineties, early oughts are a bit difficult to interpret - read: somewhat boring and not even emotionally involving - very well written, though.

I don't think it Dozois's fault (I generally agree with his selections), more that the genre fell into a huge pit from 1995 onwards and is onlly now recovering with the new Space Opera movement and aht is seemingly a reaction against Mundane SF (I have mixed feelings about thee whole mundane movement - I like it as a writer and I HATE it as a reader - I think I see the subject of a future post in this one: do we really write what we like to read?).

So, are we present at the staart of the resurgence of written short SF?  Or is this a mirage?  I hope it's the former, because it's a type of literature that I truly enjoy.

Getting used to my new computer - the internet connection works like a dream, and hopefully will have MS Office installed later today (Microsoft almost got me to use their Works suite that comes with Vista, but the difficulty of importing Excel files to the spreadsheet sealed their doom).  The return of Word and Excel should signal my return to high productivity.

Do any of you have a love for large or leather bound books?  About a year ago, I began replacing some of my most beloved oft-read, dog-eared mass market paperbacks for omnibus editions.  Ideally, I prefer leather bound books (I am overjoyed at my leather bound edition of the complete Hitchiker's Guide series, and my conmemorative LoTR), but will also buy omnibuses in hardcover or paperback.

Apart from replacing my rapidly disintegrating paperbacks, this also helps to save space in my library, which, when you're me, is something that merits consideration.

Sadly, I've found that despite owning many series that are classics (Dune, Foundation, the Robot books, etc.), it is nearly impossible to find decent omnibuses that hold the books - so I appeal to the blogosphere: does anyone know of a small (or not so small press) that specializes in special editions, and allows internet purchase without being forced to subscribe to something?  Anybody aware of in-print omnibuses of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke -  or even Eddings or Anthony?  Thanks!

In my writing, I started a new humorous urban fantasy - 140 words, and continued with the mainstream humor piece, as well as seeing that Every Day Fiction has its May ToC up: I'm slotted for may 19th!

I recently promised to post about reviews and reviewers, a topic that, if you are a normal, well-adjusted writer will have turned you into a maniacal, depressive wreck at least once in your career.  Reviews are one of the best reason to stay unpublished - the happiest writers I've met are those who write a couple of sonnets and then never send them out.  No rejections.  No reviews.  And they still mention the fact that they're writers when speaking to the opposite sex in bars.  Perfect.

The rest of us, though, have to hold our breaths and await the reviews as they come in.  Asimov said (approximately) that there are two kinds of writers: those who bleed publicly and profusely at a bad review, and those who bleed silently and profusely at a bad review.  Which would seem to indicate that the whole review process is a bit of a strain (as if we needed any more strain).  I'm not so sure.  I'm more of the idea that any time your name appears in print or on the net, the important part is that the reviewer spell it correctly (or at least near enough that its recognizable).  

Anyway, critics mainly confuse me.   

camillealexa

It might not seem significant to people who are less writing-obsessed than I am, but today was my first mention in Locus's "What's in other Magazines" section, which mentioned my appearance in Flashing Swords 10, here. 

Not much to report on the subs side, a couple of rejections over the weekend, nothing major, and I've also started to get my wordage back on track - 400 into the translation of "Tenth Orbit".  Also did some line editing on a story written by a friend.

Another reflection over the weekend, and after one Wodehouse book and two Pratchetts in succession is that I really have to get back to writing humor.  It's something I've had some success with, and, when I'm on, it's something I truly enjoy doing.

One of the nicest things about being back in Argentina is that there are bookstores here that actually have books in English in stock (Mexico is one of the worst countries, reading-wise that I've ever visited.  Mexicans simply don't read, and those that do don't read anything in English.  And the postal system was unreliable, so Amazon wasn't an option!).

I went to one of my favorite places, a store called KEL, and bought "How Right You Are, Jeeves", by PG Wodehouse.  I know I've said this before, probably often enough to drive everyone nuts, but they don't call Wodehouse "the Master" for nothing.  The man is incredible, his sentences are beautiful things to read, and, to make it even better, he's often very funny.  This book, par tof the Bertie and Jeeves cycle, catches him in mid-season form, and is actually laugh-out-loud funny, something Wodehouse is normally not.  Absolutely brilliant.  I'm not going to belabor an old point (for a brilliant introduction to Wodehouse, pick up Douglas Adams's "The Salmon of Doubt", which includes the intro DA wrote for "Sunset at Blandings", and is far more eloquent than anything I might be able to say, as well as much longer).

And it also reminds me that I have two comedy WIP which I haven't worked on in a while.  It also reminds me that comedy, when done well, can be truly brilliant writing, too.  

No words today, but sent out the Global Warming story.  April was a productive month despite my house move and resigning, and working from a new computer which I still am not used to!

First off, I'd like to apologize for the absence (how tense it the blogosphere, that four days is considered a long absence).  Been settling in and getting everything together, and over the last couple of days, I've also been working on the final edits for my Global Warming story (if I have a little time I always give priority to the writing / editing side over the blogging).  So the final edits are done, and all I have to do is type it in.  Should be out by tomorrow at the latest.

Conclusions about writing a story specifically for a market that requested it - first off, it's a lot harder to do!  I suppose veterans who are asked to do this all the time are probably jaded enough that they don't worry unduly, but I felt the pressure here!  Next, I'd read one of the other stories, so I had a feel for what was needed, but also had the limitation that my story had to be COMPLETELY different from the one I read, which led to some self-consciousness in choosing the theme (which ended up all right at the end, since I like the theme I picked).

All in all, however, it was a great experience, and one which I would gladly repeat in the future.  And I will make the deadline with time to spare, so if any rewriting is needed, there is plenty of time to do it in.  Whew.

Current WIP - other than the Global warming piece:

1.  Scifi novel.  Will try to get some wordage in later today.
2.  Humorous fantasy novel - way on the back burner.
3.  Humorous mainstream story
4.  Sword and Sorceress Story
5.  Tenth Orbit Translation.

So...  glad to be back.  Will be regaining regularity over the next few days.

Does anyone blog on weekends?  Intuitively, everyone should be more online on Saturday and Sunday than the rest of the week, since everyone is at work during the week, right?

Anyhow, not much to tell today...  Got 400 words into the secret project over the weekend.  Still on schedule to finish it well before the deadline despite the low productivity.

See everyone tomorrow!

Today was my last day at my current job.  May 1st sees me back in Argentina with a new set of challenges.  All I'm waiting for is the date of my flight (which my new company is going to pay for - YAY!).  Happy about the new job, happy to return to Argentina, happy to leave Mexico City (avoid if at all possible!!), very happy to rejoin Cecilia, but I will miss my team - a great bunch of people whom I wish the best.  THANK YOU - the enormous success we've had over the past eight months would have been impossible without your hard work and dedication!

Was a bit of a hectic day in which I got only 400 words written in the Secret Project story, which is advancing nicely.  I think the first draft might be done by Monday...

Also got a couple of lightning rejections over the last couple of days.  It seems the lake of fire has a thing for my flash fiction.  In order to save wear and tear on my psyche, both have been sent out to new markets with notoriously long response times.

Last night, I finished reading Isaac Asimov's Werewolves, a collection of werewolf stories from the magazine, edited by Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams.  My first though was: "man, selling a werewolf story to any major market probably isn't easy".  So I was expecting to find a collection of really great, different stories.  I did and I didn't.  There were two stories that I felt were good enough to overcome the stigma, three that were all right (meaning that they were good reads, but if an unknown had subbed the same werewolf story, it might have had a hard time) and one that only got into the magazine because the author's name is well known - it was that bad.  For the record, the two that were truly different were "What Seen But the Wolf" by Gregg Keizer and the simply excellent  "Boobs" by Suzy McKee Charnas - which not only overcame the resistance to werewolves, but also won a Hugo.

This brings us neatly to today.  Werewolves, vampires, zombies and S&S are often cited in the guidelines of many magazines as stuff they specifically don't want to see.  And yet when a blockbuster containing any of these "tired old tropes" is released, people flock to the box office.  I wonder why circulation is falling genre-wide?  It's a mystery to me!  Might it have to do with the fact that magazines specifically discourage what people want to read?  Who knows.

At least when the dust settles,  we'll still have the S&S doorstop fantasy books, and mags like Flashing Swords (promise to speak at more length about FS in the future).

Anyhow, onwards.  Happy to report that I received my contributor's copies of Desolate Places and Golden Visions.  Haven't read them yet, because they're in Argentina and I'm in Mexico, but photos look great.  Happily, I will be united with them next week.

My writing today was unusual.  I actually finished two stories.  1550 words brought the Etruscan Fantasy story to a close.  And then I was having lunch when I was suddenly struck with a great idea for a flash piece.  250 words later that was done and subbed.

So, total writing:  1800 words - and TWO new stories.

Happy today, because, for the first time ever, I have been chosen as the featured writer at a publication (I once had the featured story in another publication, which ended up meaning that their in-house critic demolished it, but that's another story!).  Golden Visions has made me their featured author - which means that they said nice things about me online and gave me a place to say supposedly interesting things about myself (of course, I managed to put two typos into a couple of paragraphs, but that's just natural!).  

Here's the link:  http://goldenvisionsmagazine.homestead.com/featuredauthor48.html

This has definitely been some week.  

In other news, I got out my shoehorn and started piling content into the middle of the secret project story - despite my lack of planning, it seems to be coming along all right.  Put 1000 words into it today - so I have between 1500 and 2000 so far, depending on the trimming I end up doing to what I wrote yesterday.  About a third of the way to a rough draft, then.

Also:  
Sword and Sorceress story (remember, this one has to be finished by mid-may, too!): 400 words - it now stands at 1300
Sci fi novel:  390 words

Total: 1790

Writing advice takes many forms.  Heinlein says only to rewrite under editorial command.  Others have said that the secret to writing is rewriting.  That a piece is never finished until it's been rewritten so many times that the original work is barely recognizable.  I say:  thank god for Heinlein!  

One of the best sites for writing tips I've seen, or at least the most entertaining, is probably Michael Swanwick's "Unca Mike's Bad Advice": http://www.michaelswanwick.com/evrel/uncamike.html  .  I think the best thing about it is that it gives the same advice that everyone else does, but with the nuggets only really recognizable by people with a) a sense of humor, and b) the IQ of a pigeon or higher (I think that these two characteristics exclude a larger number of people than we normally like to think).  Highly recommended.

So why am I talking about writing tips to an audience that consists mainly of published authors who already know this stuff?  Well, in the first place, I enjoyed the Swanwick site and wanted to give it a plug, and more importantly, it was on my mind today because one of the rules often cited is that bad planning kills stories.  I broke this rule today, not through bad planning, but through realizing that the two opening scenes of the secret project story were not the two opening scenes, but the first scene and the last scene.  Now I get to shoehorn the rest of the story into the middle...  Not at all what I had in mind.

Oh well...  Now I get to re-plan all the stuff in the middle, but at least I think I haven't broken it.  Net result: 970 words into the secret project - I think at least 800 will survive the restructuring.

Another 120 words went into the Etruscan Fantasy - essentially a short description of a flat clearing in a mountaain valley.

Total:  1090 words - and, most importantly, I started the secret project story.

Has anyone else noticed that writing news tends to come in bunches?  Last week I think I might have mentioned (or perhaps screamed while howling at the moon) that I got four rejections in one day.

Now comes the good news and the balancing of the writing karma.  Yesterday was the invitation to the secret project, and today I got word that my story Ghetto Galileo, a story with a unique premise, which I quite like, but which had beeen trying to find the right home for a while has sold to Golden Visions.  It will be appearing in either the July or October editions. 

Another piece of great news is that the Strange Worlds of Lunacy antho is on sale now from CyberAliens press, edited by Lyn Perry and Crystalwizard.  This one has TWO of my stories in it - Chinese Eye and The Surgical Option (as well as pieces from a whole bunch of really, really good writers), and you can purchase it here:  http://www.lulu.com/content/2342433

Warning: it really is very silly.

It's been a good weekend, but the thing about the bunches boggles the mind - and it seems to happen all the time.  Rejections might trickle in, but good news is always two or three things at once.  Which is great when you're on, and terrible when you're off.  But I'm definitely not complaining.

On to the writing side of things, I really wasn't feeling all that creative today, so I put some 230 words into the translation (translating is hard work, I prefer writing!), and polished and subbed the deep space story.  But the bulk of my day was dedicated to the research for the secret project - aiming to get my facts straight - and to working out a rough plot.  Due to time constraints, this one has to be correct right out of the box, so I'm planning carefully.  My idea is to jump in tomorrow and havee it done within the next two weeks.

During the months I've been on LJ, I've sometimes felt like a second class citizen, despite everyone being freindly and at least as crazy as I am.  Why, you ask?  Well, it's that everyone has at least one secret project underway, while all I had was the run of the mill public stuff.  I'm happy to announce that that has changed;  I got an email from a publisher I respect and admire asking me to submit a piece to (you guessed it!) a project I'm not allowed to talk about just yet.  How cool is that?

Now all I have to do is write a great story worthy of standing next to some big names - and do it in one month or less!  No stress (Actually, I'm very happy to have gotten this particular invite).

So, today I spent some time thinking about the story - trying to get just the right balance of this and that (hey, I told you it was secret).

I was also able to get my thousand words in - barely.  I was so absorbed with the new work that it made it a bit hard to concentrate on the other stuff, althoough I eventually did get into the particular writing Zen I need:
Tenth Orbit translation:  490 words
Etruscan fantasy: 600 words - and I managed to do a detailed outline of what comes next.  Important because I have to get it in under 5K words and can't afford to ramble.

For those of you who were wondering where I am with the whole "Watching all the James Bond movies in order" thing, I am happy to say that I caught "License to Kill".  How is it that Dalton isn't considered the best ever Bond?  The two movies in which he acted were, by far, the best of the bunch.  Only Casino Royale, fifteen years later, comes close.  And the two Dalton Bond girls are truly beautiful - I mentioned it before, but they're the prettiest since Ursula Andress, IMO.  Still waiting for my all-time favorite, though - stay tuned.