(no subject)

A brief list - of varying significance, and in no particular order - of things that Chaz likes:

leaving the back door open all day, so that Barry and I can come and go independently;

reliably writing two thousand words a day, every day;

finding that Barry asserts his independence for, oh, ten minutes at a time, then comes to check up on me;

catching up with an old friend who flies in from Berlin after seventeen years;

watching Barry watch nature programmes on the telly (ooh! birdies! kill!);

being given chilli plants unexpectedly, in this year of crisis;

scoring my first professional science fiction sale (of which more later), which gives me the full hand of SF/F/H, at least in short stories (so now I just have to write the SF novel)(and sell it);

repotting chillies and mints into my own fabulous compost.


A mercifully briefer - but probably more significant - list of things that Chaz does not like:

finding greenfly even on the new chillies, even after just one day (anyone know a charm against aphids? I've tried everything else...);

the ineluctable loom of impending financial catastrophe, which current busyness is too late to forestall (indeed, I have a theory that current busyness is actually just displacement, to stop me thinking about the real world too much);

the fact that the last five days of current busyness have been spent not on the novel, but on a short story that I'm not even getting paid for, that is currently a baggy, sloppy, shapeless mass of undifferentiated text, which it will take another couple of days that I can't afford to salvage into anything remotely resembling what I need, assuming that it's not beyond saving altogether. Bleah.

(no subject)

Okay, so the SF story I mentioned is bought for fjm's Glorifying Terrorism anthology. I'm flattered and honoured and actually doubly thrilled, because the cause is so worthwhile; but the degree of pleasure that I genuinely feel - after, let's face it, thirty years of selling stories - is predicated on the genre. I did so desperately want to be an SF writer when I was a teenager, and I gave up trying because I simply didn't have the science, and it's taken me all those thirty years to come back to it. To be honest, I still don't have the science; I call this science fiction because it's dressed in sfnal clothing - orbitals and lightriders and such - but at heart it's fantasy-science rather than true extrapolation. Happily, I don't care; the same definition would embrace half my favourite SF. I'm just going with the label, out and proud. It's the story that counts, anyway: character, theme, narrative, everything that's underneath the clothing. Body and blood. Lots of blood, in this instance. shewhomust was an early reader, and says delicately that it's a story she's glad to have read and wouldn't care to read again any time soon. Fair enough. Myself, I have just reread it, to see if it needed work; and actually what I want to do is take all that sfnal clothing and recycle it into another story. I do tend to find myself thinking in cycles, series, more than stand-alones; this wants to be several short stories and at least one novel, probably a sequence of novels. Hell, I've even got titles. What I haven't got is time to play. When a busy writer dies, in some ways the saddest thing is the list of unwritten books they leave behind them, that no one now will ever write or read. Last time we counted, my own list stood at sixteen titles, novels that I could sit down and start writing tomorrow if someone would commission them. And it only gets longer, never the other thing. Break, heart, I prithee break...