Yeah, so I need to get some things squared away in this arena. I’ve only got four stories currently pending (which is kind of low for me.) I’ve decided that “Five African Beers” needs a complete rewrite based on the rejection from Gordon at F&SF, who said he thought the story was told from the wrong POV. I happen to agree, and I don’t see much point in sending it back out until it’s fixed. That could take awhile. “Sleeping Weather” wait patiently for me on my hard drive. It needs a once-over (or twice-over) before it starts doing the rounds.

“Miss Pavlichenko” has a second draft due in class in three weeks. Among lots of retooling, it also needs, erm, an ending. I want to see if maybe this story, which can easily hit the five-figure mark in word count, might serve as about 2/3rds of my masters project.

Of course, the non-sensical thing to do is to start a new story, which I did this morning to the tune of about 1K words. “Pastures of Plenty” it’s called, which I’ve mentioned before. This story is like a nagging child tugging on my coat and I’d like it to stop bugging me, please. Since you can’t tie up an unwritten story in a sack and drop it off a tall bridge into moving water, I’m just trying to write it to get it out of my system.

The end of Grapes of Wrath draws near, probably sometime next week. ‘Tis good. It’s helping fuel the story referenced above.

I had a meeting with a professor yesterday who has a professional interest in science fiction, more specifically utopian studies. It turns out he’s a huge Jeff Ford fan and is planning to write a paper on “The Well-Built City” trilogy. I didn’t tell him I’ve seen Jeff wearing eye shadow and a tiara and lived to tell the tale. He’s also teaching a utopian seminar next semester (he mentioned a couple Sam Delany books) and said I should think about taking it. Um, yes.

In other good news, the graduate school said I could transfer three credits from MSU to UW-M for attending Clarion. This still needs to be approved by the English department, but I thought the grad school would be the harder nut to crack. If the English department approves it and a few other things fall into place, I could conceivably be sitting for my masters exam this August. I think this is a good thing.

In summary, life is busy but swell. Everyone at school keeps telling me to be as productive as possible before disillusionment sets in, so that’s what I’m trying to do.

I haven’t been surfing blogs very often and if I owe you an email or haven’t touched base for awhile, forgive me.

Finally, I’m happy to say that today is my six-year wedding anniversary. Normally, we celebrate with a high-five and maybe splurge on crab rangoon appetizers with our Thai carry-out. We might try one of the shiny new restaurants in Milwaukee this year, but we’ll see.

Current Mood: Busy |
Currently Listening To – Woody Guthrie – “The Asch Recordings – Volume 4″