Now it can be told . . . .

The coyotes of Mexicali were bold. They did their business in cantinas, in the middle of the afternoon; the police, well-fed with bribes, looked the other way. Day by day, week by week, people came into Mexicali, carrying backpacks and bundles and small children, and day by day, week by week, they went away again, vanishing while the back of the police was obligingly turned.

The short story I was having so much angst over was "Coyotaje," and it's been sold to Ekaterina Sedia's anthology Bewere the Night. (A sequel anthology of sorts to Running with the Pack, but there's no connection between my two stories.)

It just goes to illustrate what every writer figures out eventually: that the ease with which a story comes out of your head has no particular relationship to its quality. I'm actually quite proud of "Coyotaje," even if writing it was like pulling my teeth out one by one with rusty pliers. Not that the difficulty automatically implies quality, either; I've had stories that just raced from my fingers which I was also extremely proud of. The two things just don't correlate at all.

Release date is April, if Amazon can be believed; I'll keep you updated.

post-Yuletide thinkiness

Yuletide being my first official foray* into fanfiction, I'd like to spend a little time thinking about it. Out loud, of course, because that's what LJ is for.

(*Technically a lot of the stuff I made up in junior high was fanfiction, either of the "insert my own original character into this novel" or the "huh, I really like this setting, let me run amok in it with only passing references to the canon" varieties. But most of it never got written down, and none of it was really shared with anybody. Hence unofficial.)

I had to offer 4-8 different fandoms, and the ones I chose were: the Gabriel Knight computer games, K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, Hard Boiled (the John Woo film with Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung), Into the Woods (the Sondheim musical), Shakespeare's Hamlet, Norse mythology, and Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

How did I choose them, from a list of about four thousand? ( It was complicated. )

Ultimately -- not that you could tell by the difficulty I had writing "Coyotaje" -- I think this was very good practice for that hypothetical day when I start being invited to closed anthologies; there, again, I may be asked to write to some kind of theme or prompt, which isn't something I have a lot of experience with doing. It was also boatloads of fun, because of the sheer joy and shared fannishness that Yuletide brings out. Here, the old canard holds very true; it's just as much fun (if not moreso) to give than to receive. It's social, in a way that writing so rarely is. I got more direct commentary on my Yuletide pieces than on most of the short stories I publish -- no joke. The egoboo is non-trivial.

So yes, time permitting, I will do Yuletide again. Will I write more fanfic, outside the exchange? Maybe; I have some ideas bopping around my head, and it's no bad thing to sometimes do writing that's purely for fun. But for now, I've been a slacker long enough; it's time to get back to some paying work.