I’m having an amazing week for story sales! Just sold “Trixie and the Pandas of Dread” to Apex Magazine. It’s not slated for an issue yet. Editor Lynne Thomas said it’ll probably come out in 2013. *happy dancing*
Just got an acceptance email from Cricket for both “The Tiger Fortune Princess” and “The Girl Who Drew Cats”! They’re going to serialize “Girl Who Drew” in the February and March 2013 issues. Woot!
Got my Dragon*Con panel schedule! In all the Daily Dragon pre-con hubbub, almost forgot the non-Daily Dragon stuff:
Looking forward to seeing folks there!
I’ll be a guest at Faerie Escape: Atlanta this weekend (June 15-17) for a “celebration of all things fae.” It’s a fun little convention with impressively eclectic programming, including panels on fairy tales, workshops on everything from costuming to building faerie houses, parties, and gaming.
Herein my panel schedule (download the complete schedule booklet.) :
Hope to see folks there!
There’s something I’ve beep shying away from posting publicly about. I dunno, but I kinda feel like if I mention it in public, it gives it more credence or tangibility or something, plus I’m hyperaware that I might be overreacting or experiencing a hypochondriac medical-intern effect. But then, what’s a blog for if not for over-sharing every now and again?
Basically, I’ve felt for a while now that I’ve been losing my words. Beyond a motivation or story flow issue, I feel like I’m perpetually groping to communicate anything. Frustrating beyond belief, yes. And also utterly terrifying.
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People often ask me where I get my inspiration. Here’s the true tale of today’s inspiration:
I normally don’t have a problem with creepy-crawlies. I like rats and mice, I’m fine with spiders, and I think bats are adorable. But I can’t deal with things that squish. Earthworms send me gibbering for cover, leeches petrify me, and maggots on a TV show make me blanch and the little hairs on my arms quiver. So when I realized the little smear of tan-orange on the shower door—which I initially thought was soap scum or mildew—had antennae and was oozing its merry way across the glass, I leaped, dripping wet, out of the shower and shrieked for the slumbering husband to save me.
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Had a great weekend at OutlantaCon. Got to be on panels with fabu folks like Kayelle Allen, Kiernan Kelly, Dennis Upkins, Kage Alan, Paul Bright, and Shae Connor—some of whom I’ve known for years and some I met for the first time. I’m bummed I wasn’t able to catch up with Lee Martindale, though. Somehow, the stars never aligned.
Did have something of a hectic, panicky morning on Saturday, though. Lying in bed at 9:20AM, idly scrolling through the OutlantaCon schedule app on my phone, I realized I’d somehow missed being added to a panel: “Social Networking.” That day. At 10AM.
I woke Matthew with a yelp and chaotic scrambling ensued. I did make it to my panel on time—with five minutes to spare, even—but, of course, had absolutely nothing prepared.
Then again, I actually did some prep for my “Job By Day, Writer By Night” panel on Sunday but promptly forgot to bring up one of my talking points, which is ironic as it was on the importance of making time to do the little things like eat and sleep and exercise while juggling the myriad hamsters of writing and the day job so as to be able to maintain focus and productivity. So, yeah, unfocused. But my fellow panelists, Shae and Dennis, had it covered.
Sorta been feeling blah for weeks now. All year, really. Between having the worst lupus flare-up I’ve had in ten years and the rigors of the legislative session, I’ve been utterly wiped, which has not done great things for my emotional equilibrium. But the session is well over, I started doing yoga again, and have a search party out hunting for my absconded motivation. Here’s hoping the rest of 2012 is better than its beginning.
OutlantaCon 2012 is this weekend at the Holiday Inn Select-Perimeter, as in it starts today! OutlantaCon is always a fabulous time, full of great panels that are both entertaining and enlightening, and sometimes even bawdy. Hope to see folks there!
I’m slated to be on these panels:
At long last, I have relinquished my beloved OG Droid and upgraded to a shiny, new Droid 4.
This wasn’t undertaken without some trepidation. My OG Droid was rooted, overclocked, and running a custom ROM with a lot of snazzy features, and I knew that I wouldn’t be rooting a new device for at least a year (not until after the warranty expires) so would have to deal with bloatware and a manufacturer’s skin—Blur (Motorola), TouchWiz (Samsung), or Sense (HTC)—running atop stock Android in addition to not having all the customization and control over my device that I’ve grown accustomed to.
But as souped up and modded as it was, my poor old Droid suffered from something I couldn’t fix: a shortage of RAM. At only 256 MB, even running a streamlined Gingerbread ROM to maximize memory and CPU balancing, I was having to strip off apps to conserve space and was still seeing an inevitable slowdown—despite overclocking the processor to 1 GHz. Every time one of my apps got an update, I had to weigh the increased size of it (upgrades to apps inevitably include size creep) and potential increase in CPU demands against the amount of internal storage/RAM I had, which usually meant I didn’t install the update. But even with painstaking space hoarding, websites were taking forever to load, apps likewise took forever to launch and frequently force closed or froze after they did finally open, and it often took half my train commute simply waiting for a status update to update already.
The thing is, I’m impatient. I just plain hate waiting for anything (not an advantageous personality trait for a writer to have, btw). And I’m also usually crunched for time, which exacerbates my normal hurry-up-already mindset to a perpetual state of “Rrarghh!” *gnash teeth, foam at mouth*. Of all the bells and whistles I enjoy ringing and tooting on my tech, what I really want is speed. I crave blazing fast, snappy responsiveness, lickety-split data downloads, and instantaneous content.
So when the Droid 4 came out touting 4G, a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor, and 1 GB of RAM, I had lust. Continue reading
Had a fabulous time at JordanCon 4! And I continue to be impressed by how well organized and devoted the volunteers are at this convention.
Got to meet Emilie P. Bush, the author of Her Majesty’s Explorer: a Steampunk bedtime story (which is indeed a children’s steampunk tale; how cool is that?) and Paul Stevens, an editor for Tor, both of whom are awesome. Also got to catch up with Mary Robinette Kowal and Michael Livingston.
I met Mike at the first Launch Pad workshop in Laramie, WY, in 2007. Can’t believe it’s been so long since we last gabbed. I’m so pleased JordanCon had him as a guest this year, and I greatly enjoyed doing panels with him.
Mary was the guest of honor so was, unsurprisingly, booked up pretty solid. She also had a story deadline this weekend—which she made—and is getting ready to move to Chicago. Yet she still managed to find time to chat and party and conduct informative and entertaining panels. I am slack-jawed with awe and admiration. I particularly enjoyed her “Schmoozing 101” and “At The Intersection of Puppetry and Science Fiction” panels where she shared some fascinating tidbits of her writing process with puppets as both correlate and metaphor. She also regaled us with a tale of a Puppet Show Gone Terribly Wrong, which had the audience howling. I laughed so hard I had to wipe away tears, and I will never think of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale in quite the same way ever again.
