Busy Summer

Every time I think it'll slow down, I realize I have more deadlines looming like great looming things. (Thank you Mssers Curtis and Elton)

I barely squeaked in under the wire on my Where the Girls Are submission. Oh man did I have fun with that one. The title is Don't Fuck With Country Girls. It's a little slice of revenge fantasy with a lot of hot sex. The only thing that makes me pause a bit is that I wrote it present tense. I rarely do that. The only other present tense story I have published is Red By Any Other Name, and now when I look back at
it, I wonder what ever possessed me to write it in the present tense, but I do remember making that choice deliberately at the time. This one just sort of worked out that way. When I edited it, I thought about making it past tense, but the opening paragraph is:

"My clit is fat and sassy. She peeks out between my lips to lick my panties as I
walk up the stairs to the metro station. She knows I’m taking her to you."

I don't see that working as well in past tense.


Last weekend, I saw that the theme this weekend on ERWA's Story Time is mysteries. I haven't subbed a story there in ages. I've only just eased back into critiquing. But who can resist a mystery theme? The theme used to always be noir. I love noir, but I'm glad they expanded it, because so few people write noir well. So I have a caper in mind, and I'm plugging away at it. It's (as I said about my other piece with these same characters) so frothy it's almost foam. The caper isalmost an afterthought. But man, it's a lot harder to write 1940's style overlapping dialog and banter than it
would seem. The words really hold up the structure of the piece, so if I have to change a phrase, every supporting and following piece of dialog is affected. Plus it's hard to make it sound natural and not forced when it's not natural at all, and it is very manipulated. It has to be done in two days. Yipes. But I think these tight deadlines are good practice.

After this, there's another call from Jolie du Pre that I want to try to submit something to, I don't even have an idea yet. I only have three weeks to get it to her. But after that? Yes, dare I hope, I think I'm in the clear. except the novel I'm writing. And lord help me if I glance at the calls for submission, because I'll probably find something there that interests me

BTW - for the past two weeks, my Earthlink has been extremely wonky, so I've had little internet connection. Hopefully they'll solve this soon. But I doubt it. They suck.