Author Archives: Eugie Foster

Laptop fretting

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According to Fedex, my laptop landed in Hapeville, Georgia this morning at 6:28AM. Since it’s in the state, it ought to arrive at my doorstop today, doncha think? *twitch* Yes, I’m obsessing.

[edit: Ooo! It made it to Alpharetta at 8:12AM! Now how long will it take to travel from the local Fedex facility to my doorstop? Ooo!]


Writing Stuff

Nathan, my Scrybe Press editor, asked for synopses for “Inspirations End/Still My Beating Heart.” No biggie, except for some reason, I was having a hard time coming up with something that didn’t sound entirely trite. Not sure why. Could it be because both stories are in first person? But I can’t figure for the life of me why that would make a difference. I did assemble sentences. Will go over them this morning to see if they actually sound as terrible as I thought they did last night. Hope to get something respectable together before noon.

Started on my Tangent review of this week’s Strange Horizons story. I also need to do a Critters critique. I haven’t done one in a couple weeks.

The SFWA Nebula and election ballots came in the mail. More voting. Whee. The election one is pretty much a no-brainer, but I’ll need to do more reading before I feel qualified to cast my vote for the Nebulas.

The new Chinese folktale story is done! Actually, I’m not happy with the final paragraph; I might add another sentence or two on it to round things out better, but for all intents and purposes, I’m at “the end.” Rah. Going to do another couple passes on it, then foist it on Matthew.

Words: 400 + 2 editing passes.

Club 100 For Writers
8

500/day
21

D*C staff meeting

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The Dragon*Con staff meeting on Saturday was productive. Got to chat with excellent folk like dire_epiphany, astralfire, and roget, give huggins to fingerman, and hook up with lord_darkseid and pagmatic. Think I’ve acquired two new reporters, although I’m waiting on writing samples before I confirm.

Reminder to self: must send in guest application to D*C soon.

Watched Shark Tale yesterday, courtesy NetFlix. It was . . . pretty. The animation was nice, the set and background was quite lovely. The actors did a fine job with their roles. But the story. Oy. It lacked the freshness and comedic genius of Shrek, and failed utterly on pacing and storyline. I got bored with it pretty fast. There were amusing moments, but not enough of them by a long shot. Not a movie I’ll be clamoring to watch again.

According to the Order Summary thingy, my laptop should arrive today. Impatience is me. I’ve been functional with the desktop computer, but it’s far, far from ideal. Need me a laptop. *fidget twitch*


Writing Stuff

Acquired a new reviewer for Tangent. I totally spaced on his second assignment. He notified me right off the bat of the conflicts of interest he has (i.e. which publications he couldn’t review), and of course, I assign him to one of the markets he has a conflict with. Doy. Not my sharpest moment.

Received word from Nathan, my Scrybe Press editor, that the plan to get my new chapbook “Inspirations End/Still My Beating Heart” out in time for Fantasm is still a go. Rah!

Metallic Love

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I discovered the best LJ community EVAR yesterday: baaaaabyanimals. Now that’s an instant cute fix.

Later today is the first 2005 Dragon*Con all-staff meeting. I’m all confused about how many staff slots I have open. You’d think I’d have figured out how to count to ten by now, and yet . . .


Writing Stuff

Metallic Love by Tanith Lee arrived from Amazon.com in the mail yesterday. I set it aside for most of the afternoon, but it kept beckoning me, all seductive and alluring. I gave in to the inevitable, settled down with Hobkin on the couch, and submerged. I surfaced briefly to eat dinner and hammer out a few sentences on the WIP, and then checked out again until I finished it.

As the sequel to The Silver Metal Lover, one of my all-time favorite Tanith Lee books (who is one of my all-time favorite authors), it doesn’t hold up. I wasn’t as enamored with the new main character, Loren, as I was with Jane. Nor did I like the new Silver (renamed Verlis) as much. But overall, it was excellent–which is largely self-evident since I read it in effectively one sitting. If I weren’t holding it up to Silver Metal Lover, I’d probably give it higher marks. And it’s not that it suffers from being a sequel–Lee goes to great lengths to make Metallic Love a different sort of book; it’s definitely not another Romeo & Juliet–although there is quite a bit of closure in it. But in many ways it’s a closure I didn’t need. Overall, I don’t think it’s a book that needed to be written, but I greatly enjoyed it. And, very importantly, it didn’t ruin the first book for me, which I was somewhat anxious about.

Words: 100 – The barest minimum scrawled out in great haste so I could return to Metallic Love

Club 100 For Writers
7

Frienditto

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All this flurry over frienditto put me into research mode. From what the site seems to indicate, it’s a way to archive your LJ–although there are much better archiving tools available. Apparently it’s also a sneaky way to make public to the world the locked posts of people on your friends list. Read the informative post zannechaos made about it if you are unfamiliar with what I’m talking about. And as a helpful community service, arkady has created ditto_cop to track archived LJs on Frienditto.

Moral of the story: Friends do not let friendsditto.

[Edit: ditto_cops is a community dedicated to tracking archived LJs on Frienditto. Thanks, jmeadows for the info!]

NPR!

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We were on NPR! The 6:50AM airing of Marketplace had the Mount Airy Lodge story. Matthew and I were on it! Wheee! The reporter, Aries Keck, said she’d send us an MP3 of the story after it aired. Looking forward to getting that so I can play our couple seconds of coverage over and over again. Well, maybe just once.

Also heard back from my Daily Dragon network person. He isn’t returning to my staff this year. He’s not going to Dragon*Con for various and sundry personal issues. That means I’m out a network guru. Crap. I should probably ask for one at the staff meeting this weekend. Or I could just do without this year and glomp on the guys in photography to fix things for me when they break. That’ll probably work out just as well. But I liked having someone on call that I could page 24/7 during the convention. Hmph.


Writing Stuff

Received: 9-day “nice writing here but” from JJA at F&SF. Sigh.

Words: 500 – Approaching the climax on the Chinese fairy tale. Should finish it today. Then I’ll give it a couple editing passes, foist it on Matthew, and toss it up for Critters to maul.

Club 100 For Writers
6

500/day
20

Handy hubby, NPR interview, Agent fretting

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Matthew displayed he was handy yesterday. Two out of three of our bathrooms had ailing plumbing. The flapper chain thingy in one of the bowls had broken, and the flush handle thingy on the other had cracked apart and would no longer do its job. And to top everything off, the light switch in our master bath had been possessed by some evil spirit that got its jollies from flickering the lights off and on at random intervals.

My intrepid hubby went to Home Depot, picked out the correct replacement parts, and installed them all by himself! (Well, I held the flashlight and was in charge of tool acquisition.) So now we don’t need to call either an electrician or a plumber! I’m so proud of Matthew.

And in Cool Happenings Out of the Blue, we got an email from an NPR reporter who was doing a story on Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos (where Matthew and I honeymooned). Apparently it’s closing down and auctioning off all its fixtures and stuff. She’d come across my write-up on our experience and wanted to do a phone interview with us. So we emailed her back, and she called us shortly afterward. Interview happened, story slated for Friday’s Market Place. Neat! I spoke little, as this triggered my speaking in front of people phobia, but Matthew was great. I hope they got a few good sound bytes from us. Going to tune into NPR’s Market Place on Friday for sure!


Writing Stuff

Sent out eight queries to agents yesterday (yes, mroctober, one of those was to bgliterary). I think I figured out why this whole query/agent thing is freaking me out. With queries especially, agents gauge whether or not you get bumped up the slush to the next tier of consideration solely on the basis of an introduction letter–not the first page of a manuscript, not even the first paragraph. The letter.

I’m pretty confident about my prose. I can tell when something really sings, and when something really sucks. Can’t always get the sucking bits to sing, and certainly can’t coax forth much more than a warble most days, but I trust myself to know. Not so with queries. Totally new ground there. I mean, I’ve read fiction for most of my life and I know what I like and what works. I haven’t read very many query letters. What’s a masterful query? What’s the equivalent of the Eye of Argon?

Also, I’m fine with having a story judged by its merits, but I’m freaked out by the idea of having me and the future of my writing career evaluated solely on the caliber of my introductory letter. Glah.

To top off my anxiety, I received a rejection from Surreal yesterday. It was a nice one, as they went; they invited me to submit again, but I’m not in a good headspace for rejction right now.

However, in the taketh and giveth front, arkhamrefugee contacted me about a paying writing gig. It’s always sweet to get solicited.

Words: 700 – The Chinese fairy tale continues apace. ‘Bout halfway, and I’m pleased with how it’s turning out.

Club 100 For Writers
5

500/day
19

Writing. Agents agents agents.

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Writing Stuff

Okay, I think it’s time I started getting serious about acquiring an agent. I consulted my market listing spreadsheet for more places to submit my middle-grade novel, and discovered that several markets that used to accept unsolicited submissions will now only look at agented works. Suddenly, I find myself in circumstances where my submission options are seriously constrained by my lack of a literary agent. Going to send off a few queries today, and I dropped a note to my mentor, Ann Crispin, to see if she’d pass on a good word about me to her agent.

This is totally new territory to me. I’ve made one or two forays into agent-land, but have been haphazard and unenthusiastic about it. Time to start being systematic and efficient. There’s much anxiety here, and I’m not sure why. Why is submitting to an agent harder than submitting to an editor? It really shouldn’t be.

Stupid brain.

Started on a new Chinese folktale to go into my Cricket queue. Made good headway into it. The virtue of 2K children’s works: gratification is fast, and I tend not to get bogged down dealing with plot pitfalls.

Words: 700 – the first day in a while where I’ve been able to hit my 500 goal. Rah.

Club 100 For Writers
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500/day
18

The Commonly Confused Words Test

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I am procrastinating, ergo I took The Commonly Confused Words Test that I’ve seen floating around. My score:

Advanced
You scored 100% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 61% Expert!

You have an extremly good understanding of beginner, intermediate, and advanced level commonly confused English words, getting at least 75% of each of these three levels’s questions correct. This is an exceptional score. Remember, these are commonly confused English words, which means most people don’t use them properly. You got an extremely respectable score.

Ironically, the quiz creator spelled “extremely” incorrectly.

It’s all about the ergonomics

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I’m getting antsy, waiting for my new laptop to arrive. Our desktop machine is just not ergonomic for me. The monitor’s too high. If the seat is adjusted such that I’m comfortable, I crane my neck having to peer up at it. If I raise the seat high enough so I’m at a good eye level, my feet are off the floor and my back hurts. It is simply a wretched working setup. It’s great for Matthew, but he’s got seven inches of height on me–eight when he doesn’t slouch.

Want my laptop now, dammit. I see from the order summary that it might be another week before it arrives. Crap.


Writing Stuff

Received a 20-day “passing on this” from Chizine and the proofs of “The Life and Times of Penguin” (slated for issue #18 of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine) from my editor, benpayne.

Going to see about sending out a few more queries + 3 to publishers for my middle-grade book today.

Giving up on the Egyptian mythos research for now. Returning to the tried and true: Chinese folktales.

Words: 100. Rattled off just to get them out. I’m under no delusions they were any good.

Club 100 For Writers
3

Fulton County Cats in Need of Home!

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From britzkrieg:

On February 1, 2005, Fulton County Animal Services was called to a home in Alpharetta [Georgia] where we found 160 cats. Unfortunately, 134 of the cats were dead on the scene. The remaining cats were rushed to a veterinary clinic and all are expected to eventually recover from their ordeal, though as you can tell from the pictures some are still not feeling well.

Once the cats are healthy enough and available for release, FCAS will be adopting them into new homes… If you are interested in adopting one of these cats from FCAS (probably mid-March), please make note of the cat’s name and animal ID number and fill out the online application located next to the picture of the cat.

The full article on the Fulton County Animal Services website: Cruelty Case Cats

If you’re an Atlanta local or a Georgian, or even if you don’t mind a bit of a drive, please, please consider adopting one of these babies. They deserve loving homes, every one of them!