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Oof. I just sent a long, and sort of angsty (re: publishing issues) e-mail to a much more accomplished writer friend. Which would be okay if she were a close friend, but she's more of a friendly acquaintance (who made the mistake of asking me how things were going). I hope she doesn't mind.

I have a few issues that I really could use help / advice on, from someone further along in the game than I am. But I do hate bugging people. :-(

On the plus side, I'm having a good week. Monday, I wrote all day and finished major revisions to my Wild Card story; with any luck, there won't be more than a final clean-up pass to come. In the evening, I gardened mightily, digging up two beds and putting in about half of our vegetable garden. Lots of veggies!

I rewarded myself Tuesday with an actual day of vacation -- I spent it reading, watching tv, and playing Civ V. Excellent, although whoa, I am out of video game practice after five years away. My body was sore after several hours of play!

Today, I was dealing with a bunch of household paperwork (doctor's appointments, summer swim lessons) for much of the day, but I had enough time to make a fancy salad for lunch (from Mixt, berries, goat cheese, homemade balsamic vinaigrette and candied pecans on a bed of spring greens with basil and mint) and feed it to Roshani and Kevin, which was satisfying. And then Uma came by for writing day, so I'm hoping to actually write a little bit. I dealt with some writing-related e-mail, at least. Soon Angeli is going to stop by with posters for Saturday's theatre event here, which is so cool. Shakespeare in my house! More on that anon. We'll have tea, and it will be lovely. And then the kids will come home, and I have a lawn to mow.

I'm just happy. It's so nice to have varied, busy days, with socializing and fewer intense deadlines. :-)

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This morning, Jack Kotz sent me the rough sketch for the second illustration in The Stars Change, "Thick as a Brick." I loved it. There's a human, there's a lizard-y alien (who sort of looks like one of the aliens in Lilo and Stitch), there's flying cars and an implied intimate moment between two males (I almost wrote two men, but of course, they're not both men, and how cool is that?) -- it's just so neat. I would show it to you, but I think Jack gets a little stressed when I talk about showing his unfinished work to the public; he's a perfectionist, which I can understand and sympathize with. I would hate for all the drafts of my stories to be out there -- some are a real mess! So even if I think that this sketch looks great, I appreciate the artist's conviction that it will soon look much better.

I can't draw, but one of my plans for this summer is to start trying, at least a little bit. I have a how-to book, a sketchpad, good pencils, and a few projects in mind. When I have time, I'd like to take classes. But if I can't draw yet myself, to illustrate these fantastic images in my mind, it's almost as fabulous to have Jack doing it for me. It satisfies the little girl who spend a truly ridiculous amount of time tracing Robotech people and their spaceships on thin paper; I wish I still had those images to show you. They may be buried in my parents' house somewhere. For a few months, I was obsessed with that world.

One of the elements that made me love speculative fiction so much as a little girl was the sense of wonder, the magic of these creatures that were sometimes a little inhuman -- and sometimes a lot. I've spent decades mostly writing mainstream lit., and I value that work, I do. But there's a sheer delight that's come with the return to genre fiction, after so many years away.

Yesterday, I finished what I hope are final revisions for my Wild Card story, "Ties That Bind," for the next volume Lowball (oh, and I think I forgot to mention that the latest volume, Fort Freak, which works as a stand-alone and contains my linked story, "Sanctuary," is now available in mass market paperback), and it was just fun, writing in this world of mutants and monsters. My protagonist's little daughter turns into a garuda, and he's worried that every time she shifts and shifts back, her nose is getting more beaky.

These stories are giving me the freedom to be silly, and my plan for today (after dropping off the kids and watering the new vegetable garden I put in yesterday, ow, my aching back), is to just sit in my living room, enjoying the open windows on what promises to be a beautiful day, and write the next story for The Stars Change. How lucky I am, that this is part of my job. Invent, invent, invent.

An Ongoing, Erratic Diary

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