Well, that was just like old times. Market lists, put together subs, send 'em out to earn their keep. It's like it's 2005 all over again.
Hmm. That makes me feel old.
The only downside to this is how little I have on hand. Must write more.
I'd not mentioned this before (keeps slipping my mind), but: we got a robot. Or as they're packaged now, an iRobot, formerly known as a Roomba. We have named him Joe:
He does a reasonable job in keeping the downstairs clean. Ian thinks he's a bit noisy, unsurprisingly (he is basically a vacuum cleaner, after all) and the cats find him curious. They're probably wondering why he keeps running into walls, which is how he maps out where the walls are (Ian's not wondering, because he asked and we told him. The cats just weren't listening). Once he knows that, he doesn't bump into them anymore, he slows down as he approaches them. It's interesting to watch. Best of all, once he finishes the area he's set to clean, he goes back to his dock to recharge.
He does not pose well, unfortunately.
Reading: Sword and Sorceress VII, edited by the late Marion Zimmer Bradley. Found this on my shelf, and realized I'd never read it. So I am. Interesting to see the names in there I recognize (Hi Vera!).
Ian went for his follow-up on his tonsils Friday, and the medicine men pronounced him fit as a fiddle. And good, I say.
* * *
Didn't have anything to say on the Amazon.com-Macmillan showdown when it happened, and now it appears to be wrapping up very rapidly (in short: Amazon lost, but the future holds more). The future is always a painful adjustment. I'm with Macmillan on this, for what it's worth. What Amazon did basically hurt many writers I know and respect, and that's a stupid thing to do. I'm almost certainly not going to go back and change links (because, man, that's a lot of links). But I'll link to other stores in the future. I like Amazon in principle, and I'll probably still shop there from time to time, because sometimes they'll have what I want. But they won't be my first choice anymore.
* * *
Tomorrow I go and speak to professors about copyright, and the advantages to them of following it. Wish me luck.
An 8 day rejection from PodCastle.
Ah, yes. This part feels very familiar.
Bloody hell! Look! It's the 1st Battalion Transvestite Brigade! Airborne wing!
Reading: More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon.
Well, Bento's certainly much prettier, I would say. A screenshot of the two, new on the left, old on the right.
I think that leather is Corinthian. Or is it Cardassian?
There's still some database clean up to be done, of course, which is weird. Poking through the remains of old magazines that bit the dust, rejections and sales years, sometimes over a decade old. Even has my first rejection in there, from 1991, when I was still in college and especially clueless. Hoo boy. Something never change. I'm still in college, and still clueless. Ah, consistency.
Reading: The Complete Bloom County, vol. 1, 1980-1982, by Berke Breathed. This was good. Also, The Chill, written by Jason Starr and illustrated by Mick Bertilorenzi . This was not. Or rather, the illustration was good, and the story decent, but the ending did not work for me at all.
Got the word back on the third accepted but never published story. Once again, it disappeared in the editorial shift. Unsurprising, but I'm still a little disappointed.
* * *
After a relaxing evening watching Chuck and House, Lisa managed to get me to watch the first ten minutes of Twilight, in some sort of, "oh God, this is terrible, watch this" kind of way. I managed to make my escape by having her listen to Tripod's King Kong on my iPod, and swiping the remote when her evil cackles changed to giggles of amusement. Thank you, Australian geeks.
* * *
I am mildly surprised to see that my downloads from DriveThruRPG's "give to Haiti relief, get a metric ton of free files from us" are to be downloaded one at a time. There's about a hundred of them, more or less. This is gonna take a while.
* * *
After judging Manuscript Tracker not customizable enuf, I'm taking a look at Bento. For one thing, I can import my old database into it. That, I like.
Reading: Had been Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde. Yes. This. Awesome. Also, book one of a trilogy, which left me going "Gah!" So be warned. Now reading 50 Short Science Fiction Tales, edited by Isaac Asimov and Groff Conklin. In the intro Asimov complains about the problems of trying to describe a strange environment and do a decent job of characterization too, and why doesn't anyone celebrate a well-described setting? It's a mystery.
An intriguing suggestion from one of my work buddies (Hi, Cheryl! Thanks!) to solve my database problem: Manuscript Tracker, from Quick Brown Fox. Screenshots look nice, and the price is right. Free is good. Hopefully it still runs under the latest Mac OS X (what is that now? Snow Leopard? Black Panther? Cosmic Sphinx? I can never keep those straight) and then I'll be on to the next nuisance. Putting all the old data in there.
Hm. I'm going to need to get myself some new submissions tracking software. The thoroughly antiquated Appleworks 6.0 database I kept all my stuff won't work. Boots, shows the credits, then crashes. I've got a PDF snapshot of the thing, but I'm going to have to rebuild it. Man, I hate it when that happens. Pain in the friggin' ass.
Reading: Had been Seven Come Infinity, by Groff Conklin, a Silver Age SF reprint anthology I bought for a quarter at the library book sale. Most of the seven worked pretty well still, except "The Corianis Disaster" by Murray Leinster. Ten pages into it and I found myself shouting at the book, "Get to the f%$@ing monkey!".
I'm actually a little alarmed how much the troubled Doctor Druid here resembles me.
Not-A-Webring
LJ Friends
Ralan
Engen's SF&F Market Engine
Duotrope's Digest
Bob the Angry Flower
Cat and Girl
Copper
Dork Tower
Full Frontal Nerdity
Least I Could Do
Little Dee
Mister Toast
Multiplex
Neurotically Yours
Nodwick
North World
Order of the Stick
Penny Arcade
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Shortpacked!
SinFest
Something Positive
Starslip Crisis
Unshelved
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XKCD