ick time

"A Question of Heresy"

That'll do as a working title, and possibly a permanent one.

2,317 / 5,000 (46.0%)

Qoress is not happy that I made him drink someone else's spit.

Got derailed for a good chunk of time this evening, but good progress on the whole; I did about 1800 words today. Dude whose name I still don't like is onstage (it was his spit, but to be fair, he drank Qoress' in return), and the moral dilemmas will come fast and thick now.

I've noticed a strong tendency to skip over things in this story. It's a technique I'm still mastering, I think. Certainly there are virtues in describing intervening events, but those virtues are mostly native to the land of novels; in this case, I think it's a good course of action to skip them. Mind you, we'll see what my readers think when this story is done. Might be I'm wrong. It's happened before. (And it was called "On the Feast of the Firewife." I still need to go back and write the damned in-law scenes for that.)

Bedtime now. More story tomorrow.

two days left

"A Question of Heresy"

3,322 / 5,000 (66.0%)

I may have to revise my length estimate upwards, as Last is only now planning Qoress' trip for him. Serves me right for dropping my usual estimate from 6K to 5K.

If I ever get to publish a collection or chapbook of Driftwood stories, I'm going to have to revise them. It's an unfortunate truth of the place that I can't write a story in Driftwood without explaining Driftwood; even once I start selling these pieces, I won't be able to assume that my readers are familiar with the ones already published. But in a collection, I'd have to snip out all the repeated information; otherwise it would get tedious.

Time to go pick up the laundry; then I write more. Ah, the scintillating life of a writer.

when pushiness pays off

Look, a post that has nothing to do with the Driftwood story!

I don't know how I missed it when the notice went out, but Farah Mendlesohn is editing an anthology in response to a proposed British bill that would make illegal "the glorification of terrorism." This sparks, of course, concerns about free speech, and how the government might use it to clamp down on political dissent (whether in artistic expression, history books, etc). So Farah's anthology is called Glorifying Terrorism, and it's chock-full of stories that challenge the restrictions of that proposed law.

Including mine.

As I said, I missed the initial call for stories, but I e-mailed Farah to ask if she was still considering submissions, and she said she might, if any of the ones she was waiting on edits from fell through. Long story short, she's bought "Execution Morning." The Kitsune is likely one of the only people reading this who's familiar with it; it has the signal honor of being the first short story I wrote that didn't profoundly suck. I've tinkered with it off and on in the years since, but as it's a story about unpleasant and dubiously moral decisions in the face of terrorism, it's met with extremely mixed reactions, ranging from the Kitsune's awed silence when she first read it down to people telling me it's a complete and utter failure as a story. (So that lack of profund suckage is, I guess, in the eye of the beholder.)

As per a recent discussion on Jim Hines' journal, I'm not usually good at putting myself in an editor's path like this; if Glorifying Terrorism hadn't originally been an open-call anthology, I might not have tried. But hey, pushiness pays off: another sale for me, and that story finally has a home where it belongs.

And kudos to Farah for this move. She's fronting the money for the antho herself, paying well more than a token fee for the stories, and publishing it through a political press. When I'm constantly seeing listings for anthos promising their authors "a share of the royalties" (which will translate to nothing), this makes a really stunning contrast.