Mike Jasper kindly sent me some hand exercises which I'm now trying to remember to do before working. I pass them on to you in case any of you are having similar troubles:
A good stretch is to hold the fingers of one hand back toward your wrist for a ten-count, then reverse direction and pull the fingers toward the wrist for another ten-count. Repeat. Repeat. Do the other hand.
Then make a fist w/ the thumb on top of your fingers (not inside your fist). Twist the wrist all the way to the left for a ten-count, then do the opposite direction. Repeat and do other hand as well.
This last one's really good for the wrist. Make a fist again, but put the thumb on the INSIDE of the fist, so you're sort of pulling the thumb down with your fist. Angle your wrist toward the floor until you feel The Burn. Repeat and do other hand.
So there you are. In other news, Roshani and Tom and Zoe are coming to dinner tonight -- our first guests in the new condo. We're still lacking bookshelves (so there are stacks of books everywhere), a sofa in the tv room (so no movie after dinner), a comfy chair in the main room (we'll just pull over a dining table chair if needed there), coffee tables and end tables everywhere, and I'm sure other stuff that I'm not thinking of. But there's enough furniture to have guests, and if we waited until it was perfect then we would spend a lot less time with our friends -- bad trade-off, in my opinion.
I've sent off the maybe letters (except for a few authors whom I gave permission to submit late), so if you haven't received one yet, I'm afraid there's probably a rejection coming your way. I'm a little torn on whether to publish stats on how many of each there are -- I guess I would want to know, if I were an author. If you don't, just skip this part. So far, there are 81 maybe's. I've rejected 32 stories, with 134 rejection letters left to write. I'm trying to get them out as fast as I can, since I know what torture it is waiting for this kind of thing, but I'm also trying to rest my hands every hour. I don't want to just send form rejection, but I also can't afford to write new letters for each author. So I've made up a set of templates, and am mostly using those, with modifications as appropriate. I'm trying to give enough feedback that the authors at least have a sense of what I think they should do with the story (send it to another erotica market, send it to a different genre market, make it more substantial before resubmitting, etc.) -- hopefully most authors will find that helpful, rather than annoying. Again, it's what I would want if I were on the other end of this process.
Anyway -- back to the slave mines. It was a lot more pleasant sending the maybe letters than the rejections, that's for sure.