Weekly WIP Update #4

Another 16K words this last week puts me up at 56.5K total. Good times, considering the middle of a novel is the most troublesome and bastardly segment. I don’t expect anything near that word count this time next week–RadCon ate up all my writing time today, and will cripple it tomorrow, even though I’m skipping out on the middle of the day to squeeze in a few hours on it before heading back for another series of author panels–but I ought to be up around the two-thirds mark, after which the logical course of the remaining story will be relatively easy. By which I mean it will regress from being as painful as five bitches on a bitch boat to two or possibly three.

Ellen Datlow, by the way, is a cool character. She shrugs off networking con people with an honesty that’s blunt but not impolite. When asked, as an audience member in a panel on taboos, whether she had any, she replied “As an editor? .. Bad writing.”

Between that panel and a later live interview by Eileen Gunn, I’ve got a clearer picture of how a lot of the big anthologies work–hers, anyway, but presumably she’s not alone–by request, mostly, once they already know your name. How do they see your name? By working with you before, obviously enough, but also by having your name out there. She reads Interzone, I know that much.

Still trying to figure out how much appearing in smaller zines affects anything. I meant to ask her take on that, but I’m crippled by some character trait (polite deference or over-meekness, depending on your values) which means I normally don’t ask my obviously brilliant questions. Those omnipresent rambling con-goers who don’t even know why they opened their mouths in the first place have to be heard, after all.