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Wow. A bumper crop of envelopes in my mailbox… but none of them say what I want. I do want to highlight one response I received, though. This wasn’t for my novel, but for one of my short stories:

We thought it had a promising start — the writing is good, and it’s genuinely funny in places. But… [snip lots of useful information about what this editor didn’t like about the story]. That said, please do try us again with more work in the future.

I’ll take that. Yes I will. It’s not quite the same thing as an envelope full of money, but it’s the next closest thing.

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It’s April 18th. And it is snowing in Seattle. Big, wet, fluffy, gorgeous flakes. I’ve obviously stumbled into some bizarre alternate dimension where Seattle weather is something other than soggy drizzle for weeks on end, and I love it.

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28000 / 80000 words. 35% done!

Metafictional progress: Figured out what the Old Woman’s arc should look like, which is good, since it needed to start, like, two chapters ago. Found out a better way to do spell-checking. That might seem like small potatoes to some of you, but remember that I do my writing in Vim and LaTeX, which means that I have great power at the expense of occasional inconvenience. Spell-checking used to be one of those inconveniences. Sent out a new query for the last novel.

Fictional progress: Brought the Barbarian Warlord into the city. Had the Heroine go out and shoot some arrows at the invaders, which got her into a spot of trouble. Rescued by One-Eye in time for a quick getaway. The Old Woman fell into despair over her apparent uselessness (see above comments about arc), but the Heroine came by to rescue her, too.

Choice Morsel o’ the Time Period:

She listened to the water swirl around the oars. If it spoke to her, it seemed only to say Not yet, not yet, not yet.

Fifty years I’ve waited, she said back. If you won’t let me die, will you tell me why I’m here?

And the water answered not yet, not yet, not yet.

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It’s been a while since I got any agenty love. Even of the “not what we’re looking for” type–which, admittedly, is only “love” if you take a very expansive definition of the term.

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Although I don’t often comment on them, I really love the novel-progress updates that I get over at San’s and Cherie Priest’s blogs. Monkey see, monkey do:

The Sacred Mute is churning along nicely. My progress is not as quick or as consistent as I would like, but it’s greater than zero, which is the important thing. This is what it looks like:

24750 / 80000 words. 31% done!

Metafictional progress: Reworked the first six chapters to include the new Plucky Heroine. Kept the original protag as a minor character, then decided he should just die. Retroactively killed him. Fixed some niggling technical problems that made it hard for me to build my manuscript. (I am a geek: I write my novel in LaTeX using Vim.)

Fictional progress: Brought the Plucky Heroine into a (literally) smoke-filled room to talk to powerful people. Introduced her to a man with one of his eyes plucked out. Barbarian Warlord got into a fight with his wife. The Heroine’s city fortified itself, but the Barbarian Warlord proved to be smarter than he looks and found another way.

Tender Morsel of the Time Period:

The furs shifted a little and the light fell on the acã’s face. He was a man of tremendous age. His hair was thinned to white, airy wisps that clung to the fringes of his scalp. Creased jowls hung over his jaws, and his lip drooped, letting a strand of spittle dribble out. His brows were heavy and drooped over her eyes. Reze couldn’t tell if he looked at her, or if he saw at all.

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Yesterday my wife wrote me shortly after I arrived at work. She always writes me, usually just to chit-chat. But she said something interesting: “I’ve started bleeding.”

That got my attention.

She had also experienced a few mild contractions the day before and that morning, so we were alarmed, to say the least. A call to our midwife resulted in an appointment for an ultrasound in the early afternoon. It wasn’t urgent, the midwife said: she had no pain, the bleeding was really just spotting, and the contractions were highly sporadic. Still, they were unusual symptoms given that Larisa was still eight weeks away from her due date.

I took off from work early and we headed downtown for an emergency ultrasound at Swedish. The results were, basically, that nothing was wrong. Larisa was not in labor, the baby was of average size, and there was nothing wrong with mother or child. The contractions were unusual but essentially harmless, and the bleeding was attributed to more unusual-but-harmless motion in the plumbing.

So the baby is not, as far as we know, going to surprise us by arriving eight weeks early. Phew!

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So here I am, writing a scene where two people chat while making a fishing net. And I thinks to myself, “How do you make a fishing net? How can I describe their actions in a convincing fashion? I know! I’ll ask the Internet!”

And what does the Internet show me but this:

Thanks, Internet! You’re the best!