aamcnamara

Revised "The Densities of Hearts" and sent it out. That makes six stories out to markets right now, which is a personal record.

Also a personal record: I have already made more submissions in 2012 than I have in any other year. (Just in short stories, not counting the 26 queries I've sent out on A Returning Power.) I guess...maybe I have actually done some things this year? Weird.

In other doing-things news, I have found housing in London and copied a bunch of pages out of the new edition of the Conway Letters and fought with a microfilm machine (the microfilm machine won) and attempted to read 17th-century invoices. The operative word in that last clause being "attempted". (The 17th-century invoices won, too.) My advisor thought I should practice reading seventeenth-century handwriting, and he was right.

This weekend is WisCon! I am on one panel:
Are Children People? Sun, 8:30–9:45 am Capitol A
Benjamin Billman (M), Tuppence, Alena McNamara, Jack Shoegazer, S. Brackett Robertson, Kate O'Brien Wooddell
Are children an oppressed group? Certainly our justifications for treating children as we do (deciding for them, speaking for them, requiring compliance) sound familiar: Their biological differences from us make them incapable of self-determination; we must coerce them for their own good. A few SF futures imagine children commonly emancipated (Triton); more often, groups of exceptional children rebel (Slan, Beggars in Spain); and of course the single exceptional child who escapes adult control is a trope—glorified (Matilda, Ender, Lyra)—or terrifying ("It's a Good Life"). SF has an uneasy relationship with children's liberation. Are we ready for children's liberation? And what would it look like?

At times when I am not on a panel, I will go to lots of other panels, hang around in the hallways chatting, go to the Tiptree Auction (but not actually bid on anything, based on previous evidence), try not to buy the whole dealer's room, dance at the Genderfloomp party, etc.

Two weeks from now, I'll be in England. What...is this life? (I don't know.)

Another Struggle day.

I spent way too much of it watching A Very Potter Musical. Warning: it is literally two hours long. This is a fact which I did not realize until I was ensnared (ensnared, I tell you!) by its awesome.

Then I spent way too much of it angsting about having to write.

Upsides: I got a thousand words done, eventually; I queried about a short story submission that's been out for a while; I made a new submissions spreadsheet which will keep everything much more organized than before, if I can figure out just a few more tricks in Excel.

Also, I learned that Cicada magazine is now accepting electronic submissions. I have had it in the back of my mind as a good market for a while now, but the whole process of printing it out and mailing it in and waiting for a while never seemed worth it enough. (I know, arduous.) In fact, it's sort of amazing that they survived this long without e-submissions, seeing as how they actively want teen submissions. But hey, their bailiwick.

This whole day, I was itching to work on short stories, not the novel. I plan to follow that impulse this evening, starting now.