I woke up cranky, crankiness not helped by the person who was supposed to look at my apartment not showing up. This exacerbated by the person who was supposed to come by last night not showing up. *I* call when I decide not to go look at a place I've made an appointment for. Goobers. I had also had some bad dreams.
I staggered to the computer, answered some mail, and spent a while being very anal about little tweaks on my web pages. Fixed up my publications list. Revamped the beginning of the Alternative Sexualities booklist. Edited my bio slightly. That kind of thing. It's mindless, but soothing. I'm so glad I learned HTML! I really ought to track Matt down and thank him sometime; I'm pretty sure he's the one who insisted that I learn it myself instead of just begging him to do my pages for me...though that was at least eight years ago, and my memory's a bit blurry. Could've been someone else.
In the midst of all this neatening, I realized that I never got around to sending "Deep with Sea" out again after the last time it came back -- that in fact, I haven't submitted any sf or fantasy in years. (Well, aside from the poem that Tim P. just bought for Speculon. :-) So I actually spent a little time revising it and sent it out. I hesitated a bit before doing so -- the writing seems fairly workmanlike to me now, except for a few good moments here and there. If I were writing the story again, I think I could do a better job with it. But y'know -- it's four years old. That's to be expected. And if I do that with all of my stories, then I'll never send anything out, 'cause I'll always be thinking I can make them better. And I don't want them to just molder unloved in drawers. (Virtual drawers.) So out they go! We'll see what F&SF thinks of it.
But much more exciting that that is that I went to Borders around 2, sat down, and wrote for three hours, making a story out of that cooking snippet I posted the other day. It now has a title -- "Monsoon Day" -- and is out to the readers' list. I will now wait anxiously for someone to tell me they like it. It's one of the shortest stories I've written in a while, actually -- 3300 words. I'm relieved, because I was starting to feel like I'd forgotten how to write a story under 6000 words. It's possible that this one may get a little longer; I conveyed a hell of a lot of information in a small space. But maybe not. We'll see.
I'm more curious about whether people find it suspenseful. (If you haven't read it yet and are going to, you may want to go do that now and come back to this in a bit.) It's not really an action story, though things do happen. It's not a big character-change story, though a lot of character is revealed. It's really a character-has-clearly-come-to-a-very-odd-place and let's-slowly-reveal-how-she-got there story. I think it's interesting enough that a sufficient level of tension is maintained; we'll see if others agree. I have no perspective when I've just finished a story. I think it's wonderful. I think I'm brilliant. Soon enough the ugly truth will surface, but for the moment, I'll just enjoy as much as I can.
Once I finished writing, I spent three hours reading a children's book. Much fun. And now I'm home, and I'll either read for the rest of the evening, or go to a party, depending on my mood. Life is pretty good right now. :-) I hope y'all are having good weekends too.