Tuesday, February 24, 2009

If it's Tuesday, it must be . . .

Just noticed I tend to update this thing on Tuesdays. Not much to report.

Received acknowledgement of my submission to the Poe anthology.

A quick check of Duotrope reveals that Weird Tales has had something of mine for 95 days now. I did notice they sent out a slew of rejections recently (their most recent batch being on the 16th of February) and still have 36 submissions pending. Certainly too much to hope they'd print something of mine, but I like that they've had it so long.

Happened upon the blog of one of the editors of the InfraDead anthology, who reports that they are about done reviewing the submissions. Sam's Dot's Expressions Newsletter (an excellent resource for writers, by the way) reports they tentatively plan to go to print with the anthology in May. Sounds aggressive, given what else they have going on. But I should hear something soon.

Opened up one or two abandoned stories to see if anything would excite me. Moved around a comma or two and played with the margins. That's about the extent of my recent writing. When in doldrums such as this, I take heart in Oscar Wilde's famous line:

"I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out."

Speaking of which, The New York Times had an interesting article recently about what defines a "prolific" writer. Made me recall some years ago reading a quote from Stephen King about Thomas Harris, the author of "The Silence of the Lambs," who at that time averaged a book about every ten years. In the article, King asked, "What does he do when he's not writing? Knit?"

King must have gotten his answer after that article was published, if this Wikipedia entry is to be believed:

"Fellow novelist Stephen King has remarked that he once saw Harris 'writhing on the floor in agonies of frustration', because, for him, 'the very act of writing is a kind of torment'"

I wouldn't go that far. But at least for me, I feel like I've left (or lost) some piece of myself with every one of my (thus far unpublished) novels. Funny that the shorts have not had that effect on me.

Just rambling now. If you will excuse me, there are some commas which require my attention . . .

2 comments:

Cate Gardner said...

I love that Oscar Wilde quote - he probably would have despaired at my wilful use of commas.

Brendan P. Myers said...

You, and me both, sister!