Wednesday, 05 December 2001

I put in a good hour writing, working on the hospital story. I cleaned up everything I'd written up to this point, added a scene with the girl that sets up the validation, and then wrote the next scene in sequence. It's at 1480 words now.

You know, if my hair was just a little thicker, and I were just a little taller, I think I'd get a huge, ugly coat and just go with the Hagrid look. I've got the beard for it, in any case.

It occurred to me a while back that, while I suffer under the disadvantages of having a day job (not enough time for writing), I'm not making full use of the big advantage that it provides: money. Of course, short of self-publishing (which doesn't appeal), there's not a whole lot of advantage that a bit of extra money provides a writer. But one thing that it can help with is market research. I've been buying and reading a lot of the published short fiction, but lately I've been stepping up my purchases. My new plan is to get a subscription to every one of the likely markets for my own work. Any small edge that can help me counterbalance the disadvantages I've got seems worth trying.

The latest step was a subscription to Lady Chuchhill's Rosebud Wristlet, the first issue of which has arrived with work from three of my Clarion classmates. Woo hoo for us!

The occasional rejection has been coming my way, but the next likely markets for the stories that have come back all still have stories out to them. I'm not quite sure what to do in that case. I posted a question about it on Speculations.