suspense! adventure! trousers!
May. 27th, 2004 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
squeequegWell, one outta three ain’t bad.
So at the moment, I have a hell of a lot of stories out in the Big Wide World of publishing. Seven, to be precise. (Does anyone else always associate the phrase "to be precise" with the Thompson Twins from Tintin?) One to a quarterly contest, one as my sample for a workshop, two to online magazines, and three to print magazines. This is as many as I've ever had out there. And still I feel I'm not doing enough.
The usual cure for that is to write something new, revise something else and send it out, or just make sure the turnaround time for stories is very short. However, when a magazine's had a story of mine for a while, I get antsy. Antsy is often counterproductive to writing for me.
The state I'm in now is like antsy squared.
One of my stories is currently with Ideomancer, an online magazine. I sent it back in March but forgot to check the guidelines about response times. Silly stealthmuffin. Last week I checked and saw that they recommend querying if you haven't heard within 30 days.
So I send them an email asking if they received my story, visions of spamblockers adrift in my head (that's what I get for titling it "Huge Hot Debt Reduction" . . . just kidding). I wait a few days, getting progressively more twitchy, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thomascantor can attest.
Then I get a response saying that the story has been sent to the final readers for their say-so, and that I should be hearing from them in a few weeks.
I went into a corner and made Homsar noises for a while after reading this.
I'm trying not to think too hard about it. (And this journal entry shows how well that's working.) If the story gets rejected, then it's still a good sign that it made it so far, right? And if it gets accepted . . . okay, I should really stop hyperventilating.
So that's my big news. Not very big, now that I come to think of it, but enough to set me twitching.
It's likely that a lot of my journal entries will be from Thursday afternoons and evenings, like this one. My work schedule means that while I'm at work laaaate on Thursdays, there are long stretches in which I have little to do. Like this one. About all I can do is stew and wait for the editor to get her act together.
Mmm…stew…
So at the moment, I have a hell of a lot of stories out in the Big Wide World of publishing. Seven, to be precise. (Does anyone else always associate the phrase "to be precise" with the Thompson Twins from Tintin?) One to a quarterly contest, one as my sample for a workshop, two to online magazines, and three to print magazines. This is as many as I've ever had out there. And still I feel I'm not doing enough.
The usual cure for that is to write something new, revise something else and send it out, or just make sure the turnaround time for stories is very short. However, when a magazine's had a story of mine for a while, I get antsy. Antsy is often counterproductive to writing for me.
The state I'm in now is like antsy squared.
One of my stories is currently with Ideomancer, an online magazine. I sent it back in March but forgot to check the guidelines about response times. Silly stealthmuffin. Last week I checked and saw that they recommend querying if you haven't heard within 30 days.
So I send them an email asking if they received my story, visions of spamblockers adrift in my head (that's what I get for titling it "Huge Hot Debt Reduction" . . . just kidding). I wait a few days, getting progressively more twitchy, as
thomascantor can attest.Then I get a response saying that the story has been sent to the final readers for their say-so, and that I should be hearing from them in a few weeks.
I went into a corner and made Homsar noises for a while after reading this.
I'm trying not to think too hard about it. (And this journal entry shows how well that's working.) If the story gets rejected, then it's still a good sign that it made it so far, right? And if it gets accepted . . . okay, I should really stop hyperventilating.
So that's my big news. Not very big, now that I come to think of it, but enough to set me twitching.
It's likely that a lot of my journal entries will be from Thursday afternoons and evenings, like this one. My work schedule means that while I'm at work laaaate on Thursdays, there are long stretches in which I have little to do. Like this one. About all I can do is stew and wait for the editor to get her act together.
Mmm…stew…
