Miscellaneous

The last couple of weeks I've been helping the kids get caught up with their correspondence school work, mailing lesson packets, and freezing or canning food to put away for later use. We're as broke as ever, but hopefully things will start looking up soon. I never expected my writing to support us--at least, not for a long time--but I am looking forward to it bringing in at least a small amount of money. We could certainly use it right about now. So here's to thinking good thoughts, hoping a publishing contract will materialize sometime this summer.

I've been so busy lately that the writing has been at a minimum, but hopefully as I start to get caught up on a few miscellaneous household-related things that I needed to finish, I'll get back into the writing on a more regular schedule. At least I've been able to keep the short story in play, with no more than a couple days' wait between submissions.

I'm still no closer to figuring out how to do a proposal for the nonfiction, and I haven't quite passed the 30,000 word mark. Once I get to it, though, I don't think it'll take long to get it past that point, which is probably roughly the halfway mark. Unless spiritual nonfiction word length is shorter than 60,000 words, that is. I need to do my homework on this, so I know what to shoot for.

A Verdict

The short story was rejected again. I got the email Thursday. It's too bad it had to take three months to find out a verdict, but there it is. I submitted to a different magazine tonight, squeaking in just under the deadline before they take a very brief hiatus from accepting submissions. I got the "success" screen, so I hope it counts as submitted within the appropriate reading period. Nothing to do now but wait...again. So far, the story has had only three submissions and rejections, and at least one of those submissions made it past the slush pile before being turned down at the highest level, so we'll see what happens now. There are lots of markets left, even though only a small number of those are pro 'zines.

This Is Different

I'm actually at close to 26,000 words on the nonfiction, and it's fitting into my everyday lifestyle like hand in glove. The kids have commented that I haven't griped about not having enough time to write in quite some while, and that's true. This book hasn't involved my doing anything differently or even setting aside separate time to write--it's just come together in an almost organic process and hasn't taken up more time than normal journaling might take. It doesn't seem like I'm taking a lot of time for it, and yet the word count keeps mounting anyway. Cool.

On the fiction front, the short story has now been on its current submission for three months and one week, which means that now I can query the magazine about its status. That's the only problem with magazines that don't use a submissions tracker--you can't even query to see whether they received your submission until after their stated time limit, which in this case is three months. I truly hope they actually received the submission and it didn't go astray somewhere in cyberspace. I'd really hate to have to resubmit and wait another three months. I think if a magazine isn't going to have a submissions tracker, it should at least have a check-in acknowledgment, so the writer knows the submission was received in the first place. Oh, well. We'll soon see what's up, and if I need to resubmit, I will, of course.