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Tuesday, March 16th, 2004
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11:47 pm - Posted from Speculations.com:
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This is kind of odd. I just got an acceptance from a place called Whispering Spirit, and my first response to this was "Who the heck is Whispering Spirit?" It's not in my submission log and the name didn't ring a bell. I looked it up on Ralan and it's a nonpaying e-zine, which is also kind of odd because even though I'll sometimes send to print markets that only pay in copies, I don't submit to nonpaying e-zines anymore.
Needless to say, I'm pretty confused. I'm thinking about letting them have it because this story has been bounced from just about everybody else. Has anyone ever had this happen to them?
...I think I might let them take this story. Haven't made up my mind yet. Like I said, this story has been bounced from everyone else, but a few places gave good rejections. Plus I'm kinda afraid my bibliography will look less impressive if I have a nonpaying e-zine.
Any suggestions?
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(531 comments | comment on this)
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10:13 pm
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Well, tried to update this journal for all your entertainment, but the internet swallowed it up. That's because computers are shitty and stupid. I'm not going to bother retyping everything.
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| Monday, March 15th, 2004
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2:41 am
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New words: 2,200
Words for this month: 8,100
Words for this year: 28,100
That was the most I've gotten done in one day in a long time. And a lot of that was written in one sitting.
I didn't mention this earlier, but one year ago today I started the story, "There Are Better Kittens Than These," which would later become my first sale. Since then I've sold over twenty-five other pieces, ranging from fiction to poetry to creative nonfiction. Let's hope that this next year will be even more generous.
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| Sunday, March 14th, 2004
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12:31 am
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Got myself a little tipsy while surfing the internet. Made it a little bit less boring. Now, thankfully, I'm a little tired, hopefully tired enough to fall asleep. I have a lot to do tomorrow.
I really, really miss Ashlie. For some reason when I finally got ahold of her tonight I wasn't too talkative, I don't know why, I wish I had made more of an effort to talk. Tomorrow I can sit on her couch and she can cuddle up in my lap.
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| Saturday, March 13th, 2004
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10:59 pm
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oh wait...house to myself...full alcohol cabinet....time to drink away the boredom :-)
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9:46 pm
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Alright, so the theater in Newark cost me only $4.50 today for a ticket. For once in my life I didn't feel ripped off when I went to the movies. Starsky and Hutch, or however you spell it. Stupid me got lost in Newark, didn't copy down directions correctly but eventually found my way there five minutes before the show started and Michele and I went in.
It was cute. Not fantastic, but worth $4.50. It had some originality, and even though the vast majority was not original, it was funny anyway. This movie probably won't become any sort of classic but it's worth renting at the very least.
Weather's been holding out ok, I think we're almost to the point of no return for snow, I hope it doesn't snow. I really don't like snow. There was one time I thought snow was pretty, it was when it froze over a few months ago and the moonlight was reflecting on the ice. But other than that, no. No way. Snow is terrible.
Last night, finished the Orchid Thief. Good book, however by the time you finish reading it you're just as sick of Orchids as Laroche. The Orchid world is at once fascinating and at the same time suffocating, for all its natural connections to nature it's just as political as anything else.
Ashlie's phone is busy. Must. Keep. Calling. I hate calling past ten because her parents always pick up and they're in bed by then and then they have the walk the phone down to her and I feel like an ass.
Oh yeah, I'm home alone. Mom's in Florida. Rest of family is at my brother's swim meet. Apparently he got a 1:02 on his 100 fly today, not bad for a 14-and-under. If he didn't slack off so much my brother probably could have gone to states this year. He has so much talent when it comes to swimming but he wastes it by slacking off just like I did up until my senior year. During my senior year I finally shaped up and put my heart into it but I never had a ton of talent when it came to swimming, I was decent, I could pull my own weight, but I was never the best. Especially when I moved up to the college level. I hadn't felt that useless since my grade school days when the kids on the playground played favorites and I would be in the group that one of the captains would point to and say "Ok, you can have everyone who's left." Not to take those days seriously, playground football was utterly ridiculous, basically ten thousand kids going out for passes, no real defense or anything, every man for himself. But being on the college swim team was sorta like that :-P
Now to try and call Ashlie again.
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9:33 pm
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Started some preliminary packing and laundry. Now what? It's only 9:30 and I'm already bored stiff.
Of course the answer to that is simple: there's a ton of things I could be doing, no, *should* be doing, but I'm definitely not in the mood right now.
I can't even think of anything to write about in this journal.
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9:11 pm
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Ok, I'm leaving for school tomorrow afternoon, which means I have until then to figure out everything I have to pack. For some reason I'm paranoid that I'm going to forget something I need.
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6:41 pm
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Had a story pass the first round at NFG. The editor's comment was that he "loved it," which is more positive than the comment I got the last time one of my stories passed the first round, something along the lines of "my head hurts, can I go lie down now?"
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| Friday, March 12th, 2004
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11:18 pm
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Well, didn't get any writing done today. Thought up a cool idea for an essay though while I was cleaning the garage. The garage took longer than I thought and it was a windy day and it kept blowing everything around when I was trying to sweep. Not too bummed out about the writing, though, I'm ahead of schedule for my monthly goal. Tomorrow I have to get on the ball for my creative nonfiction piece and have it finished by Sunday night.
So, like I said, I cleaned the garage today. I worked out at the gym, got some reading done (I'm almost finished with The Orchid Thief, I'll probably finish it tonight) rented some movies. Watched "American Splendor," a documentary/film on Harvey Pecar (sp?). Not a bad film at all, and whenever I'm lonely at home I can always think about him, he had it much worse.
I've been feeling like I haven' t taken advantage of all this free time to write, but now that I look back at my word counts it looks like I did, I'm usually struggling to meet my monthly goal and here I am ahead of schedule. I've also gotten a ton of reading done, some good reading at that. It feels good to fall back into reading for pleasure, I missed that, and it helps fuel ideas. I've gotten a ton of new ideas over break, for a few days I was even entertaining an idea on a novel. But I scratched that quickly enough, I don't think my writing is strong enough yet to write a novel.
Didn't get a chance to talk to Ashlie tonight. Her dad said she wouldn't be back until late, and I didn't want to be nosy to ask where she was. I hope she's having a good time. Tomorrow I'm actually gonna get out of the house and go see a movie with my friend Michele. At least I can say I did one thing over break. Heh, and to think we were thinking about doing something actually fun all those months ago. "Let's go to Canada over spring break!" Yeah, Canada...that was several hundred dollars ago.
There's been some stuff I've been neglecting over break that I needed to do. Turn in some applications, transcribing the interview. Stuff like that, so I'm going to try and shove all that stuff into the next two days. I'll probably try to start a to-do list.
I've felt kind of gloomy over break. Depressed even. You would think that exercising would make me feel better but I can't tell if it has. I think I need to put things together in my life, things feel loosely connected, not firm. I need to get things in focus when I get back to college. Some day.
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| Thursday, March 11th, 2004
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10:53 pm
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Why does Comcast have such a problem with blurty? I have to fight with it every day when I'm home just to be able to update my journal, and it's absolutely the only webpage I have trouble visiting. Out of the billion other websites out there, why Blurty?
Anyway, unless the mood hits me later tonight, I really don't feel like getting any writing done right now. Which means I've gotten done today a grand total of.....nothing! Yeah, that's right, I sat around and cleaned and not much else. The most eventful thing I got to do was go to the Y and work out. This is not what my summer's going to be like. I absolutly won't let that happen, because just ten days of this is enough to drive me crazy.
In some small attempt to give this day some worth, I'm going to try to shoot out some more fiction to various markets, but right now I'm in one of those funks where all my writing is terrible in my eyes and any editor who will want to buy it is crazy. So naturally, when I send it out tonight I'll just feel like I'm going through the motions.
I need another big sale and I need it soon. I also need to figure out how to make better use of my time. This sitting around the house shit and checking my email every five seconds has got to go. I must have checked my email a hundred times today, and not a single response came in.
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5:42 pm
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Could a day get any more boring?
This summer I'm going to have to make an effort to make friends wherever I work. I already wrote an entry about how I didn't make an effort to keep in touch with anybody in high school, so step one would be to get into contact with the few who are still worth talking to and actually get together with them. I even let it happen in college, too, I entered a close-knit group of four people and now people I used to hang out with aren't much more than acquaintances. The end result is the weekend coming and all of us being irritable because we have nothing really to do and no money to do it with. I'm not saying that I want things to get out of hand to the point of the obsessive drinking and partying of last year, but to actually *do* something for once, and not just with the same four people I see every day. I was talking to Ashlie the other day about it, how last year, second semester, we had reached the perfect medium in our social lives, and we tried to piece together what happened so we don't have that anymore. Basically it came down to a few key people either graduating or falling into other social groups and some other small things that added up. I guess when Mikey comes back from England it will be a little better, so it's not just me, Mike, and Ashlie, sometimes I think we get a little sick of each other. There's a lot of days that just feel like Blah, a term I use to sum up: knowing that I need a job always in the back of my mind, knowing that I have some task for school to be doing, and having nothing really interesting to do, which leads to me checking my email every five seconds and waiting to see "zero new messages" almost every time I sign onto comcast. Needless to say, it's on the extremely slow mail days, mail days like today, when I feel the most Blah. I even prefer days when I hit a lot of rejection to days of Blah, because then I could at least feel hurt, some kind of emotion instead of feeling stagnant.
I think I need to get a hobby. Reading the Orchid Thief makes me want to get a hobby :-)
Any ideas?
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2:46 pm
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I think I'm going to have to go cold-turkey on these rinky dinky $5-10 paying webzines. I find myself using them as a crutch, only submitting my stories to two or three bigger places before shooting them to these 'zines which gobble them up right away. I mean, it's pretty pathetic that I haven't sent anything to Asimov's or Sci Fiction since I was in high school, and even with F&SF I've only sent them a handful of stories. The little rinky print 'zines I'll still submit to, however, because appearing in print has a little bit more prestige. So, as of now, I'll only submit to these semi-pro 'zines, with a promise to myself that I won't submit anything to semi-pros until the story has been to at least four pro places. This is only for genre-fiction, my non-genre fiction is a whole other category:
Agony in Black
ASIM
Book of Dark Wisdom
Challenging Destiny
Continuum SF
Crimewave
Cyber Oasis
Flashquake
Flytrap
Full Unit Hookup
Futures Mysterious Anthology Mag
Happy
Leading Edge
Nemonymous
NFG
Neo-Opsis
On Spec
Permutations
Say...
SF Reader
Talebones
Tales of the Unanticipated
Wicked Hollow
LCRW
Twenty-three markets, not too bad, I can work with that.
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2:02 pm
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Well, I checked my postal mail today and I had a rejection waiting for me, and it made me realize that I've never received an acceptance through postal mail. That's kind of odd. Of course I send out far more email submissions than postal submissions, since they're easier and less expensive, but still, you would think at least one postal acceptance would have floated in within the last year.
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12:56 am
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New words: 400
Words for this month: 5,900
Words for this year: 25,900
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| Wednesday, March 10th, 2004
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11:49 pm
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New words: 300
Words for this month: 5,500
Words for this year: 25,500
This is turning out to be a very productive break.
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2:38 pm
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Scratch that whole book idea. I'm not going to write a book this summer.
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12:03 am
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New words: 1,000
Words for this month: 5,200
Words for this year: 25,200
Started and finished off an essay that I'm really quite proud of. I think I might send this one to the Missouri Review first.
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| Tuesday, March 9th, 2004
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8:21 pm - Another Sale
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I'm very pleased because my third non-speculative sale became official today. Pine Magazine accepted my story, "A List of the Lies My Roommate and I Told This Poor Kid Named Ben Who is One of Those Guys Who Will Never Quite Fit In and Who Has Latched Onto Us and Visits Our Room Every Day and We're Pretty Sure He Believes Most of Them," today.
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12:48 am
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New words: 100
Words for this month: 4,200
Words for this year: 24,200
Looked at the clock. Saw that it was 12:30. Decided I was going to write a poem about this time of night.
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