Kathryn Cramer’s just posted the TOC for the Year’s Best SF 15 (edited by Kathryn Cramer and David Hartwell, available soon from HarperCollins). On the list of included works, amid stories by Bruce Sterling and Alistair Reynolds and Nancy Kress and Geoff Ryman and many other folks, is this: On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War Machines of the Merfolk.
There might have been squee about that around these parts. The spokesbear gets excitable. You know how it is.
My attempt to roll out the productivity and conquer The Fear hit a road-block yesterday – what seemed to be a minor computer problem (power jack coming loose from the laptop casing) has rolled out into a terrifying ordeal which will culminate in the absence of a computer in the house for 5-to-1o working days while the problem’s corrected. The computer goes in this morning, so…well, basically I’m quietly screwed after that. No word-processor, no e-mail, no basic tools of research. I can work with a pad and pen, but these are only good for the drafting rather than the actual finishing and submitting of work. This…complicates…that whole submit lots of things in February plan.
Meanwhile, in more positive parts of internetland, the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2009 has just been released. Horn got recommended in the novella section and my Strange Horizon’s story On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk is mentioned in the Short Story listing.
My mind, it is blown by this turn of events.
(Congrats also to Lisa Hannett and Paul Haines and a bunch of Twelfth Planet Press projects and a bunch of other friends I’ve probably missed, but I’m skim-reading everything right now due to the dwindling battery power).
Mornin’ peeps. The laptop’s on battery power* at the moment so I’m racing against time to get a blog-post written before the computer yawns and says “sleepy now, going away.”
Yesterday I wrote 381 words on a story, poked at another to see where it fell over**, cleared out 50-odd e-mails had been waiting for me to answer them since the beginning of January***, ate half a loaf of bread, took out the rubbish, pondered tactics for tonight’s Bloodbowl game****, and learned that one of my stories from last-year has been picked-up-for-a-reprint-that-I’m-not-sure-I-can-talk-about-yet-so-we’ll-leave-that-there.
Among the various e-mails was a note from Andrew C Porter that basically went along the lines of linked you on my blog, and you might want to go check out the nice things Apex Submission’s Editor Maggie Jamison said in her interview. And so I went, and nice things were said, and Andrew’s blog proved to be fun and vaguely maddening with his insistence on posting Advanced Dungeon’s and Dragon’s trivia that I half-remembered but couldn’t *not* try and answer out of some vague and misplaced sense of gamer-geek pride. Andrew’s also got interviews up with John Klima of Electric Velocipede and Rick DeCost of Absent Williow Review, and blogs quite honestly and amusingly about the whole trying-to-get-published thing.
Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 0 <- Say it with me: FAIL
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 1
Days without chocolate: 1
Today the Spokesbear is: trying not to point out that giving up chocolate is pointless if I fill the gap with half a loaf of white bread and butter, failing at it, then giving me an aggrieved “shouldn’t you be working” sigh.
*keeping the laptop on battery power while playing on the internets means I can’t waste the *entire* day hanging out here.
**The beginning, mostly
***folks should know that I am teh suxxor at e-mail when afflicted with The Fear, because every e-mail starts with the question “how can I avoid looking like an idiot.”
****I play halflings. The scattered few of you familiar with Bloodbowl can laugh at the absurdity of contemplating tactics now.