B minus 3

It would probably be best to make my word count before bed, rather than make this a long post, so that's what I'm going to try to do.

Tuesday is my birthday.  I'd rather not get any older but if my girlfriend is going to keep aging then it wouldn't be fair of me to hold out on her.  I started opening birthday stuff, because she and my parents have super-obligingly sent me multiple packages.  Girlfriend got me Howell Chickering's translation of Beowulf, and that is pretty cool.  Hwaet.

This year's NaNoWriMo is five days old, and I hit the second week slump pretty early.  Or perhaps it's too early to call that; let's just say I fell behind on day 2 and 3.  I think things are picking up, though.  Soon I'll be able to introduce some more characters (there are only two right now) and more things will happen.

I'm being shamelessly self-indulgent, as I think is appropriate.  The real question is whether the sort of things I write when I'm indulging myself are the sort of things other people would want to read.  Much like when I meet people in person, the salient question becomes whether I am being tiresome or entertaining.  For now, I don't have to worry about it.  I enjoy writing meandering sentences, or palindromic clauses like: "One year, in deep winter of the deepest winter in many years..."

It's nice to be back to Myrddin now, although once I get my brain going I seem to be beset on all sides with ideas for other projects which I can't work on this month.  I invented a useful curseword for Hengist & Undine the other day at work, and then had some intriguing thoughts about the biology of planet-sized jellyfish.  The story that that second thing fits into doesn't even belong to me anyway.

On a less cool note, I've gotten confirmation that "Burned at the Stake" will not be appearing in Machine of Death 2.  Because the editors dangled the vague hope of picking from the same submission pool for possible subsequent volumes, I'm not sure I ought to post the whole thing here, but the gag order is off, anyway, and people who know how to ask can see the story if they want to.

I know one problem with the story as I submitted it (meaning one thing I would have work on if I had had more time).  I found myself wondering if I would have been more or less disappointed if I didn't have a flaw in mind.  If it had been perfect, so far as I could tell, would I have been shocked and disheartened to see it rejected?  Or would I shrug it off, privately convinced of the story's merit.

Either way, this was my first big boy rejection and it's something I'll have to get used to.  There will be more of them.

I do wish I had finished that one story before November started, so I could send it out.  I would probably be looking it over again in December regardless, so it comes out to about the same thing, I guess.

6,401/8,333/50,000