The Plot Bunny Farm

Last night, got home to a message on the answering machine from my mom. She'd gone to Sundance Bookstore in Reno (don't know if she actually went to the signing) and picked up the new Hadley Rille books. (She bought all three of the new ones: Desolate Places, which I have no story in; Ruins Metropolis, which has my story "By the Pool of the Blue Lotus"; and Barren Worlds, which contains my story "Winterset.")

"I read your stories. You know I don't usually read science fiction and fantasy. They were . . . different."

My older brother's visiting her, and all of us kids (yeah, I still call us that) read SF/F, so maybe he'll have a less ambivalent review.

I much prefer 6-y-o's comments. Six-year-old wants to grow up to be a writer, and since I'm a good writer, figures I can help 6-y-o become a good writer, too.

slobbit asked me what I'm working on these days. I told her, but figured I'd post here, too, for anyone else who's curious.

I'm trying to get my NaNo novel completed by the end of the month. I'm preparing a grant application for A Room of Her Own Foundation's Gift of Freedom award ($50,000 over 2 years). I'm writing a steampunk short story to submit to Pitch-Black's Magic & Mechanica anthology. I'm editing a pirate story to submit to the VanderMeers for the Fast Ships, Black Sails anthology--and figuring out what's wrong with this has finally helped me to see how to rewrite my Spiders short, so I'll be picking that back up in a couple of weeks. This next week, I'll probably be taking another crack at Blood Brother, including tackling the new beginning--the grant application requires a 10-page fiction sample, and I think that's my strongest, deepest work to date. I also have a few shorts out for crit that I'll be revising as I get comments back. Oh, and I have some poems I should see about editing, too.

Have some paying work going on, too--proofreading a book on Austria right now, then one on Scotland, then back to Austria for Vienna & the Danube Valley.