Writerly Wackiness

Holy crap, has it really been that long since I've been on LJ? Sorry not to have been keeping up with my lovely flisters lately, but life has continued to dance on the insane side of the fence. Hopefully come fall I'll be able to settle back into a blog reading and writing routine. Until then, I'll probably remain my current scattershot, occasionally resurfacing self.

In the meantime, here's the bullet points of what I've been up to in the writing department:

* My zombie apocalypse story "The Holy Spear" has been accepted by Black Static. This will be my second appearance in their pages, which I'm thrilled about.

* Speaking of Black Static, reviewer Peter Tennant wrote a nice post about my story "The Wounded House" from issue 20 on his blog.

* Received my shiny contributor copy of Aoife's Kiss (10th anniversary issue) this morning. Pretty.

* Gearing up for this summer's TNEO workshop for Odyssey alum. As of last night, all the critiques I had to do are officially done! I've still got a ton of other things to do, but it's nice to put a big fat check mark next to that beast of an item.

* Unfortunately, progress on the writing front has been mostly non-existent. I got in a good afternoon of revision work on My Big Fat Epic Fantasy Novel a couple weeks ago, but otherwise, that's been kind of it. But now that TNEO critiques are out of the way, I can hopefully get back in gear. I've got some revisions to do on a short story, several flash pieces I should probably polish up and send out somewhere (anyone have suggestions on where to send an unabashedly liberal-leaning gay superhero flash story?), and then back to the novel grind.

As predicted, this week has continued to be strong with the FUBAR side of the Force, but not nearly at the levels of FUBAR that Monday and Tuesday achieved.  I've barely had time to breathe let alone read what's going on with my lovely flisters today, but there were at least some turns for the shiny and positive:

First, my story "Dumping the Dead" was selected for inclusion in The Best of Every Day Fiction Three.

Second, a review of "Mortis Persona" at Tangent Online says, among other things, "Barnett's lush prose does a fantastic job of building this world."  I don't think I've ever had my prose described as lush before, but it's a description I'll happily accept.

Third, I'm on a horse.

This moment of pimpage brought to you by lemurs on a dirigible: SFRevu has a review of Shimmer's Clockwork Jungle Book issue, which describes it as a "flawless issue" and calls my story "A Red One Cannot See" a "touching tale."

Moving onto the writing front...

I haven't gotten very far on the novel rewrite this week.  My train ride to and from work is just too dang short.  When I'm writing, particularly if it's the revision stage, I often feel like I need to wind up for a bit before I hit that point where the momentum kicks in and I can really move forward. Unfortunately, that wind up time currently seems to be about the length of my commute. Grrr!

I had some other writing thoughts I was going to babble about, but I think I'll save those for another post as my brain hurts and it's dinner-making time.

We'll start with the positive. "Lucky Clover" received some nice comments over yonder: A Mystery That Reads

I got myself all signed up for TNEO this summer. For you non-Odfellows out there, that would be the The Never-Ending Odyssey, a week-long workshop during the summer for Odyssey grads. Doing the short story track, though I may throw in a novel chapter as one of my submissions. The option's there, and it's quite likely that I'll, oh, actually have a chapter fit for human eyes ready by the last submission deadline.

Speaking of, the novel de-suckification process has officially begun. Woo hoo! Tuesday nights have become Revise That Damn Novel Night. Short stories will have to clamor for attention during the rest of the week. Starting the revisions was painful. The first chapter originally opened with a prophecy being delivered. Part of the de-suckification process involves removing said prophecy from the novel. Translation: entirely new opening scene needed. I came up with this wonderful new opening sentence two weeks ago, then promptly got stuck. But this week I finally banged my head against the wall hard enough to knock some bricks loose and squirm through.

On the short story writing front, I've been utterly useless lately, and my excuses for that uselessness all suck. Other than the week or so during which my lemur-on-a-dirigible story came pouring forth, my productivity has been pretty darn pathetic. Occasional small bursts of achievement here and there, but mostly lots of swearing, teeth gnashing, and rewriting the same sentence over and over again before finally falling prey to the lure of my DVD collection and reruns of Mythbusters.

At least now I have a motivator for whipping my current story into shape: fear. The April 12 deadline for my first TNEO submission is looming awful close. So on that note, I am off to laugh in the face of distraction and achieve productivity.

My short story "The Poet" (The Sword Review, issue 27) got some positive comments on Tangent Online.  My brain was being very uncooperative on the writing front yesterday (in a display of ridiculousness, I spent nearly an hour on one damn sentence), so the review was nice to see at the end of the day.

And despite totally butchering the sight-reading portion of my chorus audition the other night, they took me onboard.  The hubby and I were even invited to join their smaller chamber choir if we so choose.  But the chamber choir means an extra hour of rehearsal each week.  I need to decide how valuable that extra hour on Monday is.