Clarion is fantastic - but it's also time-consuming. There'll be very, very few posts here until I return on August 5th. Until then, don't expect to see much.

I do have some good news of a sort: the "specimen" I submitted to A Field Guide to Surreal Botany has not been rejected. That is to say, it hasn't yet been accepted, but it has survived the first round of cuts. Quite a number of people have submitted to this guide, many of them phenomenal writers, so I'm pleasantly surprised to have gotten this far. If the piece does get rejected, I'll post it here.

Now I must get back to work - many stories to critique, many stories to write.

The anthology Short and Sweet: Original Novellas by Today's Hottest Writers has now been published. My novella "At the Edge of Ellensburg" is in it, along with novellas by Thomas Hudson, Thomas S. Roche, Marilyn Jaye Lewis, Nick Mamatas, and Valerie Grey; and a forward by the editor, Michael Hemmingson.

Don't worry, I won't be begging and whining in every post for you to rush out and get it. People either like erotica or they don't, so they either buy it or they don't. I just think it's kind of cool to hold a book in my hands and see my name on the back, and to turn to the first page of my novella and see my words actually printed on paper.

I've written a small outline for the gay bear supernatural story, and have made some small progress on the word count:

540 / 5,000 (10.8%)

At this time, I'm trying to write a few hundred words a day, and not pushing myself to do more. When I'm writing stories, I try to hit a minimum of 500 words a day - once I'm at Clarion, I'll probably have to bump that number up to "however many goddamn words I can write in the few free hours I have". But I'll keep to my couple hundred a day for this story (which is yet untitled).

If you think those are small word counts, understand that it's very difficult for me to pick and chose the right words for stories. It's so compact a form that I end up spending less time writing and more time thinking of what I'm going to write about, and thinking about exactly how each sentence needs to move the plot along. For a novel, I have the luxury of space, so I can meander a bit as I go. I tend to write around 2000 words a day for novels. And by "day", I really mean "evening" - I work a fulltime weekday job, so I only have about three-four hours at night to keep to my word count schedule, with weekends acting as "bonus" time to play catch-up. This is why I don't go out, why I don't have friends, and why I don't have much of a life in general. Writing is most certainly not "glamorous".

I've been having problems connecting to the internet at home, so there won't be much posting now until I leave for Clarion. I'm really a bit too pressed for time now to blog - the next six days are going to be all about packing and prepping for the workshop. I'll probably write one last post next Friday, and then you'll have to go to my livejournal (click on the Clarion link above) to get all the juicy gossip about freak-outs, crying jags, and dinosaur sodomy. :D

There's been some interest from an editor putting together a speculative anthology (supernatural tales with gay protagonists) - he'd like to see me submit something. It's not an actual invitation as much as a "you might want to consider looking at/writing for at this market", but it's nice. One of the ways I've seen writers break into higher markets is through being invited to submit to anthologies, especially closed anthos. The anthology in question is open, but hey. Baby steps.

Preparing everyone at work for my departure is eating up my life, so there's still not going to be a lot of blogging going on for the time being. However, once I'm at Clarion, I'll post here every now and then with regards to story progress for the above anthology, as well as story progress for two other markets I'm going to submit to - an erotic anthology of "women's revenge stories" edited by Mitzi Szereto, and Cecelia Tan's "Fantastic Erotica Stories" anthology contest. It'll be interesting to see if I can do all this: write six stories for Clarion, three stories for market, and critique close to 130 other stories. It's going to be a cruel, cruel summer. :)

This week I found out that the erotic novella anthology "Short and Sweet" is going to come out not at the end of June, but sometime in July. No specific date was given. I was also told to expect my payment to be at least four months late - if not longer.

::sigh::

This is turning into such a non-event for me, I can't even be upset. All I can do is wait, and if I don't get paid by December, then I guess I'll ask an agent to act on my behalf and contact the publisher. It means I'll automatically lose 15% of the amount, but I guess 85% of something is better than 100% of nothing, right? Gah.

Since hardly anyone reads this blog, I can post this here without the usual kerfuffle that seems to happen whenever I post something similar on LJ:

Gardner Dozois will not be able to attend Clarion as an instructor this year. Because of personal commitments, he's cancelling his week in East Lansing (sorry, I can't say why) - and his replacement will be Michael Swanwick.

On the one hand, I'm disappointed that Dozois won't be able to attend - I thought it was good to have an instructor who worked largely as an editor in the genre. However, I'm thrilled beyond belief that Swanwick is going to be teaching us. His very gritty urban fantasy novel The Iron Dragon's Daughter is phenomental, and I very excited that he'll be at Clarion this year.

I have other news, about my forthcoming so-called "publication", but that can wait until tomorrow. Time to read some Delany - it's now a nightly routine. Cool red wine, Delany's exquisite fiction, and soft feather pillows. It's the perfect way to end the evening, and start the night.

... I intend to switch over to making most posts on this blog. The livejournal blog is temporary, intended only for Clarion-related posts - although I imagine I'll continue to post there intermittently, as I track what happens to the class post-Clarion, and see if anything I wrote during the workshop actually sells. I realize less people will read and comment here, but I prefer that. I blog about writing as a way of working through problems and the process. It's thinking out loud, nothing more.

Please take a look around and let me know what you think - and, er, once I can figure out how to add comment capability without making this shiny new site all fugly, then you'll actually be able to do that. Sorry!