Thursday, 01 May 2003

I got email this morning from Gavin Grant to say that I'd sold my short story "Salesman" to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet! I went around the office telling people that I'd sold a story, making sure I told them quietly so that I'd be able to tell people in nearby cubes without them having heard it already.

Gave blood yesterday, so I had an excuse not to run last night or lift this morning. We're planning to go lift tomorrow.

No writing. Some thinking about writing, rather more than usual thinking actually.

I realized a while back that one of the stories I'd had critiqued and had started to rewrite was rather farther from being salvageable than I'd thought. So, my next step needs to be to look over my other critiqued stories and figure out which ones are reasonably close to something I could submit. I need to put them in some order and get started rewriting.

It's fun to write new stuff, but there's no point in it if I don't eventually get the stories out to editors.

I also need to go over the various stories that have come back from editors and see where else I might submit them. That's kind of down on my priority list, though. Most of those stories have made the rounds. Still, I need to look them over and make decisions about trunking them or finding a market to try, and not just leave them sitting there.

I found a sort-of review of one of my stories that I hadn't seen before. SFReader.com has a review by Jack Crane of the anthology Age of Reason that mentions one of my stories:

Even the weakest stories, "The Leaning Towers of Venice" a grim, dystopian vignette by Geoffrey A. Landis, and "Reading is Fundamental" by Philip Brewer, neither of which really fit in this anthology, are solidly written and inventive.

So, being lumped in as one of the two weakest stories is hardly flattering, but I'm certainly never going to complain about being lumped in with Geoff Landis, nor about being called "solidly written and inventive."