Author Archives: Eugie Foster

Words written: 200 Every single letter ripped screaming and kicking from my bleeding fingertips.

Why. Won’t. Words. Come? ARGH!

I think it’s time to invoke the caffeine gods to slap around my muse.

In better news, the editor of The Quiet Ward sent an email out to all the accepted contributors. The anthology is still on track for debuting at Horrorfind Weekend in August. He asked for a bio, and said the publisher will be sending out contracts right soon. Rah!

I was curious (and totally unable to produce word countage) so I did a little tally to see what my breakdown was in sales by genre category. It’s split right down the middle, err tri-section. One third of my sales are Science Fiction, one third Fantasy, and one third Horror, with a dangling Erotic Horror story to keep things interesting.

Neat.

Another pro-market bites it. And this one was a children’s lit market. Saw on Ralan.com that Just Weird Enough lost its funding before its first issue even got printed. Guess I can cross that one off my submit-to list.

Damn. There aren’t enough children’s lit markets out there. Now with both Just Weird Enough folding and Spellbound going on hiatus, the market possibilities have shrunk even more. Damn.

Spent the day with dire_Epiphany, her hubby, and son, watching all the Firefly episodes that Fox aired in their proper order. dire_epiphany made food! Lasagna and fruit salad and salad. Yummy! And they brought ice tea and even plates and silverware! All we had to do was dig in. Wonderful food, excellent company, and great entertainment. What better way to spend a day?

And I really want to slap around the Fox execs. Not only for canceling the show, but for putting the ones they did deign to show out of order. Ffft. But there’s serious talk of a Firefly movie to wrap up all the loose ends. Crossed fingers and hoping that’ll come together.

On top of that, I managed to crank out 1K on a new horror piece. Got this one outlined out, so I know where I want to take it. My main problem is the huge squick factor it’s got. It’s so squicky I feel like I have to distance myself in order to write it. But I want to tell this story. It’s inspired by real life events that are so awful that I want to write about them in order to get out the anger and horror I felt when I heard about it.

In a nutshell: we got a letter from the HSUS asking for more money, as we often do, but this one documented the truly chilling story of a pet dog in Texas that had been kidnapped from his own yard and then had his eyes gouged out. The dog was dumped and managed to find his way back home where his family discovered him, blinded and barely alive, on their porch. They rushed him to a vet and it looks like he’ll live. But they still haven’t found the person who did it.

The only good that came out of this was that because of what happened, with the help of the HSUS, the family lobbied to make such acts of extreme animal cruelty and abuse a felony in Texas. It hadn’t been before.

I am such an uber geek. I got this total thrill when I saw that the editor of The Asylum‘s website has been updated with a list of stories he’s accepted for The Quiet Room already, and I’m on it.

Guess that’s why I fixate so much on getting published, the adrenalin thrill of seeing my name in print, even if it’s just a byline so far. Wooeee! It’s better than clonazepam.

Hmm. . . . except he spelled the title of my story wrong. It’s “The Reign of the Wintergod” with “Wintergod” being one word, not two. Ah well, an easy fix to make in the galley proof stage of development.

Edit: I’m going to be published alongside Kealan Patrick Burke, Don D’Ammassa, Jack Fisher, and Edo van Belkom. Meep!

*Cross Posted to *

Hey all you Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans! Take the poll for the Family Feud portion of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Game Show at Dragon*Con! Click on the link at the Daily Dragon!

Went out to check on our websites this morning only to discover that they were all down. Every single last one of them. I type in a URL, and I get a “Page URL Not Found” error on the Comcast server. This is for all of our pages, our graphics, everything. Poof. Gone.

I’m assuming Comcast’s server went kablooie and took all our content with it. I’m hoping they have backups and will restore them soon so I don’t have to go through the laborious process of restoring them from this end. But in the interim, I’m royally peeved with them.

So I guess I spoke too soon when I said that the transition to Comcast went smoothly. The lunatic fiasco was just delayed.

Bastards.

It’s official. It took a little wheel greasing on my end because of various miscommunications, but Phobos will indeed be at Dragon*Con this year. Keith Olexa (Phobos editor) and James Maxey (fellow contest winner and novelist) have been approved as guests.

The Phobos folks are coordinating with the director of the Writers Track at D*C to arrange a panel. But it looks like the panel, autograph signing, and publicity mongering will all be a go. Very exciting! I get to be on the other side of the autographing table–the side with the pen!

Err. I still haven’t told Keith and James that I’m deathly afraid of public speaking. I should probably do that . . .

The Dragon*Con staff meeting was yesterday. Bruce Boxleitner canceled from D*C because he got a job that conflicts with the timing. Understandable but unfortunate.

We almost filled our Daily Dragon staff dearth, but the guy who we snagged got dragged to a different department by his friends. It’s his first convention–not just his first Dragon*Con–and he’s worried about getting lost and overwhelmed, which is understandable, and wants to stick close to his friends this year. But still, pook. It does sound likely that we’ll get him next year. He’s published a book and wants to do something involving writing for the con. Unfortunately, that means we’re still down a staff member. Dangit.

Joe (director of the Con Suite) was handing out these jumbo tubes of pixie stix powder. Mmm. Sugar high. He’s always giving away such wonderful things: sugar, caffeine, food. And he ordered extra cases of Amp this year. Hurray for Joe! Amp is what kept me going for large portions of D*C last year.

Got a sneak-peek of the backstage pass artwork (drawn by dire_epiphany). Very cool! Can’t wait to see the passes when they’re done.

Came home and watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit and promptly fell asleep about halfway through it. My sleep cycles are totally messed up.

Hobkin’s in my lap, totally being a comatose fuzzalump and I’m almost out of coffee in my glass. Trying to figure out how to pour a refill without disturbing the fuzzhead. Heh.

Trying to keep myself busy so that I don’t focus on my mood–currently free-floating glumness which I’m positive is totally chemical in nature. So:

Books read: Slant by Greg Bear, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling.

Reading: Slippage by Harlan Ellison

Movies seen in the theater: Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle, The Pirates of the Caribbean, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Movies seen at home: The Man Who Would be King, Key Largo.

And to get my mind off not producing any new word count, I’ve spent the last couple days updating our various websites in my free time: Musta-lay-day Grove, our homepage, and my writing page (again). I think I’ve re-set all the attbi.com references to comcast.net now, and for laughs and giggles, I played a bit with the scroll bar appearances and how the links looked. But what the hell is Bravenet doing? They’ve totally re-vamped their counter structure and I hate it. I’m giving them a couple days to see how it ends up being, then I think I might have to go looking for a new counter provider. Damnit. Oh well, only so much I can fume about a free service.

There’s a Dragon*Con staff meeting this afternoon. The last one before the convention. I think we’re still down a staff member, number-wise. Hope we can recruit one then.

Saw my rheumatologist for a follow-up yesterday. He’s pleased with how I’m tolerating the Methotrexate and wants to start weaning me off the Prednisone. The man takes “weaning” very seriously. I’m currently on 10mg/day and he wants me to drop 1mg every four weeks. At that rate, it will be ten months until I’m off the damn stuff. But at least it’s a start.

He also thinks I should see my GP about the mood issues I’m having. Since I tolerate meds so very poorly, he’s loathe to prescribe something to counter the side-effects of what I’m on without me consulting with another doctor. Sigh. I can’t keep the names of all my doctor’s straight anymore!

I’m terribly behind in writing “thank you” notes to all the (30+) critiquers that I got for my last offering on Critters. Hmm. When is too late to send a belated “thank you note”?

I’m feeling fractured, and I think it’s the meds. I tried writing something, a brand new story–something I haven’t done for a couple weeks. I wasn’t stressing my lack of productivity because I finished up a bunch of stories in quick succession a little while back and my writing tempo tends to be irregular. I have a flurry of productivity and crank out a bunch of new stuff, and then I sort of stew for a bit as they go through the critique/re-write/submit process. And I can quite legitimately claim to still be at the tail end of that as I have something waiting in the queue at Critters, not to mention something up for review right now.

But it has been several weeks, and I felt like I really needed to get cracking on some word count. I tried writing something from a mood/idea that percolated up. I thought “great, my muse is back in gear!” Managed to get through nearly 1000 words, but then I petered out. I just didn’t have the direction or focus to keep going. So I started something else that I’ve been mulling over. That lasted all of 300 words. And then an idea for an opening with no story behind it came to me. Hell, I’ve written 8000-word stories from less. So I put my fingers to keys. Got maybe three paragraphs before sputtering to a stop.

Now I’ve got three openings to stories I’d like to write. But I can’t seem to keep the momentum up. I think it might be the Clonzepam that’s making it so hard for me to focus. I’ve noticed that I lose my train of thought an awful lot of late, which makes it really difficult to achieve “flow.” I can’t seem to immerse myself totally, which is when my best stuff comes out (not to mention the greatest bulk of word count happens).

Now I’m in a dilemma. The Clonzepam is really helping my TOS. I’m not hurting. There’s still occasional warning twinges, but I’m not in active pain. But at the same time, if the Clonzepam is mucking up my muse, then that’s just a plain ole untenable situation. Snort. Irony. It hurts to write when I’m not taking the meds, but when I’m on them, I can’t seem to produce anything. And I’m afraid to ask my neurologist to switch me to something else because I seem to run a high risk of becoming allergic to anything my system gets introduced to.

Maybe I’m still in my “muse stew” phase and I’ll get back into the swing of things in a week or so.

The next step is to go the ultra-caffeine route to kick start my writing process. But the usual doses that get me twitchy but productive aren’t working anymore. I’d really like to avoid acquiring a pot of espresso a day habit in order to write.

Artists having a history of substance abuse of one sort or other (and being insane) is really resonating as a reality.