Step 2: ???

No more stabbings since last post. The world is more like it should be.

Since I last mentioned it I have both completed and been paid for my first freelance writing gig. (I am currently trying to leverage a satisfied customer into more business, one way or another.) It was Girlfriend who pointed out to me that I have been paid for writing. That's a milestone in its own right, one I've been waiting for, and one I almost missed because it didn't happen like I thought that it would.

I don't know what milestone will come next. None follows as a matter of necessity. I had decided not to submit my fiction where it would be published for free, since I don't need anyone's help to publish for free. (I'm doing that now.) Consequently I imagined being published and being paid as a single event, occurring at two distinct but connected points in time. I don't think I'm counting freelance copy writing as being published, though, although at some point a person other than myself will be publicizing words I have written for their own purposes.

I don't know why I enjoy (or at least insist on) splitting hairs about exactly what has and hasn't happened yet. I could make a distinction about copyrights, and say I look forward to being paid for a license, rather than for my entire copyright to any given thing. In this case I have sold my copyright entirely. There are words that I have written--some of which I am proud of--that I do not own, and could technically be sued for publishing. It's an odd, interesting, somewhat unsettling state of affairs.

It still remains for me to be published in a regular sense, to be paid for fiction, and to make enough at any sort of writing to cover my expenses. When any of these happens, you will surely hear of it.

In lesser news, the new Xbox 360 came in the mail and works as it should, which is a comfort to me.

It amused me that the new, major update to Dwarf Fortress was released on Valentine's Day. This one has vampires and other undead, a massively useful tweak to the interface which would be tedious to detail, and the profound enmity of my very soul. This last feature is implemented as a bug which causes it to crash when I try to save. I did not realize that this degree of frustration was possible.