Noise in the Attic

Sorry to have been away so long. That appears to be becoming a habit.

The truth is, there is nothing much going on around here that’s noteworthy. I am working on a couple of projects that I am not ready to talk about yet. Writing with the door closed, as Stephen King puts it in On Writing.

Today, I am considering buying a new computer. Well, not a new one, that is way out of my reach. A refurb is more like it. Thank God for Overstock.com. Great prices, but you get what you pay for. This old computer has done its job and got me through, but it is almost 10 years old and has started behaving oddly, in a flaky-hardware sort of way. I think it’s time.

That’s pretty much it for me. If anything happens, I’ll let you know.

I have spent most of the weekend taking care of business. The way I see it, writing is made up of three parts: composing, revision, and submitting. Composing and revision are the creative parts, submitting is the business part.

Submitting my work is hard on me. It takes a lot of courage for me to put myself out there in front of the world that way. I would much rather keep revising and revising and revising and try to get things perfect. The problem is that that way lies no publication. I can’t get puclished if I don’t submit my stories to editors for their consideration. If I imagine I hear hysterical laughter from them, that’s just part of the dues I have to pay.

Market research is a real pain. Ralan’s Webstravaganza and duotrope make life a lot easier in that regard by gathering marketing information into one place, but it still takes a lot of time to evaluate the various markets and to try to find a good fit for a story. I tend to put that off and not submit anything for weeks or months at a time. That’s not good.

I have to keep telling myself: I can’t win if I don’t try.

P.S. We had snow last Tuesday. Today, I’m wearing shorts and a T-shirt and sweating. That’s life in the Deep South.

Snow blind — as in blind crazy. We had our quasi-annual snow yesterday. As you can see, we had a minimal accumulation. This has, of course, thrown everything into utter chaos and panic.

Here in central Georgia, even this little tad of snow means schools and businesses have closed. Those who have ventured out onto the (dry) roads are driving like their heads are on fire and their asses are catching. The theory is that if you hit ice, it’s better to be going as fast as possible.

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.