Happy Friday, squiders. Hope you’ve had a good week!
So, I did end up writing that short story for the submission call, and I submitted it before the deadline (though I have not gotten a confirmation, and they say to email if you don’t get a confirmation after a few days, but that’s for tomorrow). The story was fun and easy to write. Who knows if anything will come of it, but it’s been a while that a short has flowed that easily, so that was nice.
I also looked at the horror story I’d started last fall, decided I really didn’t care, and did not finish it. I also closed the tabs I’d been keeping open to go with it. It may never get done. And that’s okay! Life’s too short for bad short stories.
I did go through a couple of other stories that I’d written a while ago and do some revisions, and this morning I spent some time sending them and another story out to markets. I used to spend a little bit of time every month sending out shorts, but I haven’t really written any lately, and the practice has fallen by the wayside.
I will say, though, that there were considerably less markets than I’m used to for spec fic. Not a surprise, I guess, in this economy, but sad to see.
I also sent out a couple of queries to agents.
All this to say that I still haven’t gotten to revising World’s Edge.
It was on the plan for today, but submission took longer than expected and now I’m out of time. Alas. But now I have hopefully gotten all the weird wiggles out of my system and we can buckle down and get to it.
(May reread the draft again. For Reasons.)
Things do seem to be spirally in general, though. Amazon emailed to say they were raising their printing prices, and I would need to raise my prices as well or else they wouldn’t pay me royalties. (Sigh. I should do that here.)
(Holy crap this is more complicated than expected, they’ve redone the categories as well. Okay, I’m going to have to dedicate some time to this. Later.)
Mailchimp, which I use for my newsletter, emailed to say they were removing features from my level of plan, and wouldn’t I like to go up to a higher plan to retain them? And the answer is no, no, I would not. My newsletter is something I use very fleetingly. I’ve never really gotten the hang of it, and I don’t email enough to retain engagement (God, I think it’s been a year at this point) or have enough news to justify emailing more often.
I was emailing out weird stories I’d found (such as the Bennington Triangle, or ghost words, etc.) but it took time to do research and write everything out and it was a lot of top of everything else. Which is why the schedule got less and less frequent until, indeed, I have now given up.
So I will need to adjust my Mailchimp to get around the loss of said features (which is mostly going to affect my ability to mail out reader magnets) or look at other options or, I don’t know, just light the whole thing on fire, I guess.
(I wonder if there are zines out there that want weird, “true” things that would want those stories? Something for another day.)
A lot of little things like that building up. Sigh.
How are you doing, squider? I hope the economy’s not getting you down. See you next week!
