Category Archives: Blog

Had a little excitement yesterday before dinner. Matthew was putting cans of Mountain Dew into the ‘fridge when he dropped one. The can ruptured and began spewing fizzy liquid all over the kitchen, up the cabinet walls, and over everyone. Think one of those fireworks that spin around throwing sparks in a flashy spiral, except Mountain Dew instead of sparks.

Matthew was bent over going “ow!” (I thought he’d dropped the can on his foot, but as it turns out, the first spray had shot him in the eye.) Hobkin was watching the show, only a few steps away from ground zero. And the wounded can was still hissing and spitting its insides in a wide spray. I grabbed up the nearly-empty can and deposited it in the sink, plucked up the Dew-covered skunk and deposited him in his area, and then took stock.

Husband red-eyed and blinking, but fortunately none the worse from being shot in the face with high-pressure citrus soda. Kitchen covered in sticky liquid. Husband covered in sticky liquid. Self covered in sticky liquid. Skunk covered in sticky liquid, wanting to get to the sticky liquid puddles lying on the floor. Dinner continuing to cook on the stove.

Eep.

Matthew and I took turns cleaning the kitchen and showering off the Dew. Tried to dry off Hobkin with paper towels, salient word being try. We all had our abbreviated dinner. Then it was skunk bath-time resulting in no-longer-sticky but most definitely miffed and damp skunk for several hours.

The funny thing is, Hobkin was right next to Matthew when the can fell and exploded. Normally, I would have expected him to startle and puff his tail up, maybe run for cover, but he took it all in stride. It’s weird what will set off the little fuzzhead and what won’t.

So we’re mostly recovered from our mishap. But the kitchen floor is still sticky.

Hobkin was very sick after dinner last night, the poor little guy. I’m wondering if it’s something in his dinner meals that’s setting him off. I just wish he could talk to us!

It’s so odd. He’s violently ill, and then a second later he’s hungry. And he gives every indication of being fine right afterwards. More than fine. He proceeded to go careening through the house, and insisted upon having a prolonged session of “wrestle mommy’s arm” with me. Maybe his post-sick enhanced energy levels are endorphins kicking in?

One thing I greatly appreciate about our little fuzzbump is that he does his very best to be good when he’s not feeling well. He was flopped on the couch next to me when he suddenly realized he needed to be sick. With haste that would make an over-boozed frat boy proud, he scampered to his area and sicked up on the towel we’ve got down in front of his litter pan for just that purpose. He’s such a good boy. Dammit, I wish I knew what was making him ill!

Writing stuff:

Rejections received:
16-day signed form from Alchemy.
108-day unsigned form from the new regime at Asimov’s.

Fooie.

Quiet night. Hobkin has shown no signs of tummy upset these last couple nights, thankfully. Although he has insisted upon me lying on the couch, serving as his own personal cushion, and he sulks if I don’t comply. He is so spoiled. But when he sprawls with his belly up and all four paws in the air, I go all gushy and can’t put him down. At least last night I had the foresight to get myself organized with my laptop so I was able to get some work done as he flopped on me.

Writing stuff:

Got five more critiques from Critters before my story rolled off this week’s queue. I was feeling pretty confident with my rewrite and actually thinking of packaging it up last night to send out, but thought “I might get a few more crits trickling in. I can wait another day.” Boy, am I glad I did. One of the last crits to come in pointed out a typo that I, Matthew, and twenty-four other readers had missed. Yikes. But now, really and truly, it’s ready. I think. Out it goes!

Received an “open letter to our authors” from the Phobos Books editor. I don’t know what information contained in that email is supposed to be public, so I’m not going into details here, but the upshot is that they’re releasing a bunch of manuscripts they’ve been holding, including a novelette of mine they’ve sat on for over a year. I don’t think I’ve done more than glance at that story in two years. I opened it up to see if I wanted to do anything to it before sending it out again.

Holy Mother of Bob!

I lopped off three hundred words in the first pass alone. Apparently I’ve learned a lot about writing tighter in the last couple years. So, yay, I’ve got proof that I’m improving as a writer. But there’s a certain trepidation I have about opening files of older stories to read through again, especially the ones I’ve sold that are waiting for publication. Will I cringe when I see them? I hope not.

Anyhoo, did several more passes and the novelette, now at short story length (barely), is ready to go out again. *shove*

And finally, here’s a bit of blurbage from C. Dennis Moore’s review of Ascendancy of Blood from The Swamp:

“Foster’s got this style, this way of phrasing that makes you forget that you know what’s going to happen, and instead get lost in the flow of her words . . . . She’s a very good writer and I hope we start to hear a lot more from her.”

La!

I am done being ill, please. Headache and nausea are a supremely unpleasant combination. Almost was reduced to tears at work from the stomach-churning pressure behind my eyes. Wanted to come home, but I’ve taken far too many sick days this year already. I think my current bout of hell-on-earth is sinus-related. Gulped pills, including two, red mana-from-the-gods, also known as Sudafed, and slumped with my head in my hands over my keyboard for a bit until the over-the-counter meds could smooth the pointy edges to a tolerable level. There was prolonged misery, but it gradually improved to mere discomfort.

So I am mostly functional now. Although still quite irked at how my body rebels against the notion of good health and wellbeing. What more does it want? I give it multiple servings of caffeine–wrung from the fresh grounds of burnt plant life–every day, lounge on the couch evening after evening, so it doesn’t have to suffer the ravages of exercise, and periodically get it hyped up on overdoses of pure, flavored sugar. Oh. Wait . . .

Writing stuff:

I know I’ve made a story title too long when I keep having to refer back to my own documents to remember what I named the bleeping thing.

Ten critiques so far on the story up on Critters. I haven’t had enough patience with myself to read through the comments as carefully as I usually do. I’ll go over them syllable by syllable when I start contemplating the rewrite, but for now I’ve just been skimming them to get the overall gist. Overall gist: good writing, not enough characterization. Sigh.

Decided to bundle together two, short folktales and send them up the queue. They’ll take their place at the end of the line when this story rolls off.

Also did the long put off rewrite of the story inspired by the Suzanne Vega story britzkrieg introduced me to. There’s so much subtext and symbolism to this one, I really don’t think it’s a good fit with the usual suspects, so I’m sending it to more “literary” places. Not mainstream literary, as it’s too Fantasy for that, but Specfic literary. An interesting niche to try to market, one that seems to pay particularly poorly in money, but exceedingly well in prestige amongst the highbrow SF circles.

I did some very depressing calculations as I went about my writerly procrastinating over the weekend. I added up what the Cricket Magazine Group will be paying me for the three stories I signed the contracts to last Friday. Each story was close to or over the maximum word count for Cricket, hence a good average of the maximum amount that market will pay all together. For those three sales, I will make almost, but not quite enough, to pay for one month of our household expenses (mortgage, bills, food, etc.) At the princely rate of a quarter a word, I would have to sell a story a week to survive at our current rate of spending.

I’d bang my head in frustration, except my noggin is still rather fragile, and quite unhappy with me as is. But at a quarter a word the notion of a short fiction writer making a living off their wordsmithing is utterly unrealistic. And to put things into perspective, there was a huge flurry of debate and objection when the SFWA raised what qualified as “pro” rates from three to five cents a word this year. So five cents a word is considered “good money” in the SF writing world. Obviously, five times that is damn fine pay.

Okay, I’m not in the writing gig for the money. I do it because I love writing. I’m an addict. I love when the words flow from my mind’s eye, through my fingers, and appear on the screen and I lose every sense of the real world around me, and become totally immersed in a story of my own creation. I love the feeling of accomplishment I get when I finish a story I’m proud of. I go through writing withdrawal if I don’t put words on the page for an extended period of time. And I’m vain enough to love seeing my name in print. But damn, it would be nice if the pay were better.

After coming back from Van Helsing and downing a cup of French vanilla coffee, I managed 1000 new words on the SF piece. Ideas are cropping up, but I’m having a hard time getting them to translate well to the page. I think it’s the present tense. I’m inexperienced with doing present tense in prose, and I think it’s coming across as too disjointed.

Also, my review of “The Voluntary State” by Christopher Rowe in Sci-Fiction is up at Tangent.

Okay, we went to a matinée showing of Van Helsing, scalding reviews notwithstanding. We didn’t expect brilliance, just shiny special effects and pretty people. Which is what we got.

Kate Beckinsale is drool-worthy. Or her outfit is. Or her boots. I don’t care. The whole package was stunning. I want that corset. And that bolero jacket. And those boots. Did I mention the boots? Ahem. She was an absolutely stunning Anna Valerious. Also worth noting was the actor who played her brother, especially as he was mostly shirtless through all of his scenes. Purr.

Then there was Hugh Jackman. More drool. Amazing the floor in front of my seat at the theater wasn’t all soppy wet. I would have liked more shirtless scenes with him in them, though. But that is a pretty, pretty man. Rowr.

And the brides of Dracula with their diaphanous gowns that metamorphosis into leathery wings. They too were lovely eye candy. And I liked how they morphed from winged bat furies to seductive vampesses.

Okay, those were the main highlights. There were other good bits. But then there were the shortcomings, the copious shortcomings.

Continue reading →

Hobkin is crashed out on my lap. We actually turned on the A/C last night, taking pity on the poor fuzzy beastie. He’s wearing a thick, fur coat after all. He kept flopping on the hardwood floor, looking quite pitiful in the heat. Freaky week, temperature-wise. The heater went off on Monday from the cold, and we switched on the A/C on Friday.

Saturday morning cartoons on. Teen Titans and now Xiaolin Showdown. Eastern culture really has infiltrated American entertainment.

Watched Intolerable Cruelty, the 2003 Coen brothers production with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones. And I sez, where’s the quirk? Have the Coens gone totally mainstream? Okay, romantic comedies aren’t a great canvas for quirkiness, and there were some clever moments, but where was the twist, the trademark bizarre humor, the screwball antics? Humph. Predictable predictable predictable. Although both main actors were, of course, stunningly beautiful.

Plan to see Van Helsing sometime this weekend, either today or tomorrow. Don’t have high expectations, but looking forward to wallowing in a couple hours of pretty people and pretty special effects. Escapism, rah.

Writing stuff:

Received word from the editor of Here & Now that issue 5 with my story “When the Lights Go out” is slated for the end of August.

Six crits so far of my current offering at Critters. Tally: one critter liked my tense switch experiment and one thought I was doing it on accident and pointed them out as errors. Sigh.

I’m having a rough time getting words on the page. Depressing and irksome.

Hobkin was sick to his tummy again last night, the poor little fuzz ball. He has such a sensitive system! And he’s gotten quite finicky about his food choices. He’s been turning up his nose at celery and cucumber (!) of late. Fed him some anti-nausea meds and a Pepto Bismol sandwich, and he was all better, but I continue to fret.

Matthew theorizes that we’re all passing some sort of flu around, back and forth, from skunk to human. Every time Hobkin’s been ill, one or both of us humans have also felt unsettled in the gastro-intestinal vicinity. I hope that’s the case, because then at least there’d be a chance of getting rid of it once and for all . . . eventually. I’d much rather it be something acute (albeit tenacious) rather than a chronic condition.

And, as a segue, I feel queasy.

Writing stuff:

Received the contracts for “Razi and the Sunbird,” “When Shakko Did Not Lie,” and “The Snow Woman’s Daughter” from Cricket today. Woohoo! The Cricket contract isn’t as nice as the one for Cicada (they’re getting some non-exclusive rights w/o further compensation, versus an additional fee) but considering the pay rate, I don’t care! All three are signed and going in the mail tomorrow. But still no publication date set. Sigh.

I’ve got a story up for critique at Critters.org. Forgot it was going up this week. This was also a mild experiment in style. I switch–intentionally even–from past to present and back to past tense in it. It’s a scene thing. We’ll see if it worked or if readers find it annoying. I did notice that my file appears to have been corrupted in the upload. I have large sections of text underlined to indicate italics, and it appears that my underline markers have gone berserk. It’s still legible, but certainly distracting. Dammit.

Also looked up MLA/APA reference citation styles again. Proactively created references for the next two folk tales I’ll be sending to Cricket. Going to send them with my submission this time. I do learn from editorial feedback, la!

It’s also a good indication of me procrastinating on the new words front since I’m wallowing gleefully in assembling business materials instead of putting words on the page. I console myself that it’s good work to get done regardless.