Squeee!

This shouldn't have me so excited, but it does.

After finishing Love Runes, I swore I'd take time off to write short stories because I had nothing coming out in anthologies this year. I saw many calls for submission that interested me, but the next thing I know, the books were in my TBR file for reviews. That got depressing. In the past year, I've sold only three short stories, and only because editors asked for them. If they hadn't, the total would be zero. But instead of moving on to shorts in December, I plunged ahead into the great time suck that is writing the first draft of a novel, and three and a half months passed - as did more calls for submission that I would have loved to have written to.

This weekend, I sent off two stories for submission. One was an older story that fit a specific call, so no work there other than reviewing it. I changed maybe five words. The other was one an editor asked for. Then, suddenly, my work time was free. (Sure, I have one story I need to finish that I promised someone, but I need to give that one a few more days to stew in my brain before I finish it.) So for the first time in ages, I looked at all the calls for submission I'd been lamenting over, found something that looked promising, sat down, and wrote a fresh story for it. Man, did that feel good. I have to let it sit a couple days before I go over it again, clean it up, and then that sucker is out the door. Yee-ha! Dance of joy!