I asked, and Kirk Alberts (the_new_low) gave his permission for me to display the artwork he did for “Inspirations End/Still My Beating Heart.” Check it out!
jinzi has already 
paid me for “Only Springtime When She’s Gone.” Uber coolness.
Got my first glimpse of the cover art for “Inspirations End/Still My Beating Heart” from Kirk Alberts. It’s glorious! Full color art with main colors a rich, blood-red crimson, and a shadowy black. I’m delighted with what he’s come up with. Can’t wait to hold the finished product in my eager little hands.
Received a pile of review books for Tangent in the mail. I think I’m going to need to clear some space to store all my review material. The current “pile it on any open counter space” isn’t working out well. I’m running out of counter space.
Received:
21-day “does not suit our present needs” signed reject from Analog.
78-day “It’s not at all bad but . . .” with invite to send more from Ellen Datlow at Sci-Fiction. I’m quite pleased with this one as far as rejections go. She also thanked me for taking over Tangent.
Woot! Sale of “Only Springtime When She’s Gone” to jinzi‘s new Women’s Erotica webzine. I believe it’ll come out in April. And it looks like I’ll be sharing a TOC with wicked_wish and naamah_darling!
RAH!
Y’all have been helpful with your input regarding whether I should buy that service plan for my laptop, but I still haven’t decided. I’m leaning toward not getting it. I’ve had one laptop or another for the better part of a decade now, and while yes, I have had battery issues a couple times, for the most part, my experience with them has been fairly uneventful. Not to mention the times they weren’t–like when I spilled tea on my keyboard and the cursor turned into a flapping bird and the system wouldn’t boot properly–wouldn’t be covered by the service plan anyway.
I think I’ll just continue to make compulsive backups (ever since an Apple computer ate half the textbook my adviser and I were writing in graduate school, I’ve been anal about it) and hope for the best.
Started on a Critters critique for a regular.
E. Sedia reviewed Leading Edge #48 for Tangent and wrote glowing things about my story, “Of Two Minds in Lanais”:
“Magic! Poetry! Fisticuffs! All this and more make Eugie Foster’s “Of Two Minds in Lanais” the best story in the issue . . .”
Okay, I’ve got fourteen days to decide whether or not I want to buy a service plan from Best Buy for my new laptop. It’s three years of coverage for $149. Normally, we never buy the things, but I’m less certain because laptops tend to be more fragile, not to mention harder to debug on the fly, than other hardware. Plus the shop person said that I can expect my battery to die in 10-12 months, and the service plan pays for itself with replacement batteries. But then, they’re paid to say that, right?
So, to get y’all’s opinion, I’ve made my very first LJ poll:
So I’ve got a new laptop on order, an HP Pavilion ze2000 to replace my IBM Thinkpad. We went out yesterday with the intention of buying a Compaq Presario from Circuit City which was having a phat sale. But when we got there, we learned they were totally sold out, with no backorder, and had been for a week. Disappointed, I went to Best Buy to see what they had, and saw a similarly phat deal on an HP machine. Since HP and Compaq merged, it didn’t take amazing powers of deduction and observation to realize that, for all intents and purposes, the Presario and the Pavilion are functionally the same. My new Pavilion should arrive next week, and will have integrated wireless LAN! Sweet. I need a laptop to write on, but I’ve putting off buying a new one while I could still use my Thinkpad. Plus I can deduct my new laptop as a business expense, which makes the splurge a bit less extravagant.
I frightened Hobkin with my big, scary coat. I wanted to give him a cookie because I felt so bad about leaving him for the afternoon to go computer shopping. But when he saw me, he fluffed up his tail and scampered under the hutch. Unfortunately, the new blanket he has (which is the nicest blanket in the house), is bulkier than he’s accustomed to, so he couldn’t get past it like he could with his old blanket. He lodged between it and the hutch opening with a *thump* and then flailed his little hind legs trying to work his way in. Eventually he managed to get under cover, but not before I got a stitch in my side from laughing so hard. The silly chicken-nose. I still gave him a cookie.
And Ten Things I’ve Done That You Might Not Have:
Continue reading
Ye gods! Fantasm is right around the bend. The last Fantasm, the final blow out. Ooo.
And hey, on Thursday’s programming they’re having a “Fantasm Fannies” awards for celebrating “those who have made Fantasm the thing we all know and love. It will be an evening full of award presentation, entertainment, and music”.
If you’re a Fantasm goer, go nominate someone for an award. Go, shoo! And if you don’t know who to nominate, try thinking “banana” and “black vinyl” for inspiration for Ms Fantasm 
.
Went back into the office yesterday, but my heart wasn’t in it. Accomplished some stuff on my “things to do” list and then called it quits for the afternoon. Came home and watched The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy with Matthew. Fun flicks, but not really anything to ooh and ahh about.
I find that I’m in the market for a new laptop. I just need a bare-bones machine that can handle word processing and wireless Internet action–email, surfing, FTPing. Light, so I don’t feel like I’m sitting beneath a boulder when I have it on my lap, and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW would be nice. Maybe we’ll swing by Best Buy and Circuit City today.
The god of publishing taketh, but She giveth too. Hey, it’s always flattering to get asked to write something for money. Thanks, wicked_wish for the recommendation!
Mailed out the Revenant Anthology contract for “Caesar’s Ghost” and emailed the editor my bio and a blurb to publish with the story. According to said contract, the anthology is slated for a June 15th publication date. Coolness. It’ll be out in time for Dragon*Con. Which reminds me, now that the guest application forms are online, I should see about filling it out and sending it off.
Beginning to send my middle-grade book out to agents. The whole agent submission thing is pretty new to me, but after seeing the numbers for Tobias’ survey, I’m thinking I want one.
Briefly broke the Tangent website. Well, maybe not broke, perhaps “dinged.” I was trying to add more sub-menu items and I accidentally created main menu additions and couldn’t figure out how to unpublish them. Several panicked emails to the webmaster later, and I fixed it and managed to add the sub-menu entries I was trying for. Whew.
Just found out I sold my short story “Oranges, Lemons, and Thou Beside Me” to the new .PDF science fiction ‘zine Transfinite. Rah! And they’re going to pay me in pounds . . . sigh. Ah well, the exchange rate is still pretty rocking. The editor said it’s slated for issue #9.
This is the absolute coolest news I have heard in a long time! From: SFWA News, posted by Glenn Lewis Gillette:
Source: University of Iowa
Released: Fri 11-Feb-2005, 12:20 ET
Libraries: Life News (Arts and Humanities)
Keywords: SCIENCE FICTION, COLLECTIONS, LIBRARY, ZINES
Contact Information: Tom Snee
Thanks to an eBay-shopping English professor, the University of Iowa has acquired more than 250,000 science fiction fanzines and almost overnight has increased its stature as a prominent science fiction research center.
