The Week's Work

The basic outline for my 4th cozy mystery has been approved by my client.

I am a step closer to being paid by Readict for the two books of mine that they're publishing, having filled out my W9 and an invoice.

I submitted a revised sketch for a cartoon to another client.

We got our screen door fixed, and some of our windows measured for new screens.

Our friend John was here for a few days, but he left sooner than we expected he would.

I haven't done any work on the cover for Before Baker Street, but I will -- possibly tomorrow.

And that's all for tonight, because I just got a short story rejection and am feeling grumpy.


Prallsville Mill, 2003, oil on board, about 24" x 18"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post #2 - Short and Sweet

Image
I 'm still learning my way around this whole blogging thing. I am supposedly -- supposedly -- updating this thing every Wednesday and Sunday. Well, today is Sunday and I forgot to do it before now, which is 6:15 pm.  In the interest of keeping this short, because supper is almost ready. I will simply say that this week I submitted two short stories, a new one and one that has been making the rounds. I also did some work on the cozy mystery I am ghostwriting. Ghostwriting is something I have come to enjoy over these past few years. I started out by doing an autobiography for a former member of the writers group I was a member of back in Doylestown. He was a fairly well-known clinical psychologist. I enjoyed the experience, though I have since learned how to do it better. My next ghostwriting gig took place a couple of years later and was easier for me, as it was a science-fiction novel. I'd previously (and subsequently) written and published a fair bit of sf over the years, so t
Read more

I Had a Good Week

Image
R eally, I did. Four days ago I sold a short story, one that I had put a lot of work into. It was originally written in 2019, and got some nice personal responses from a few magazines, including Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction . (Gratifying, but neither  bought it.) However, it has sold, to an anthology. More details later. I can't even reveal the title just yet. I also sold a novel, to Readict: An End to Housework , which is more or less mainstream with some speculative elements. I wrote the book ahem cough  years ago, and have occasionally revisited the manuscript to update it. Housework  was definitely experimental. What actually kicked it off was my reading of Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. That, plus the underground comics of Dave Sheridan and Fred Schrier. The novel (mine, not  Solzhenitsyn's) has three interlude sections that were originally meant to be drawn, like a graphic novel. But it would have taken me too long to do that, so I ended
Read more

Other Early Writing Influences

Image
 L ike most if not all writers, I began reading -- omnivorously -- at an early age. But I was drawn to "fantastic" literature almost from the start. I read juvenile stuff like Louis Slobodkin's The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree (and its sequel), the Zip-Zip books by John Schealer, and so on -- the former being chapter books, as I now know, and the latter more like what one would call YA (young adult) fiction now. (I have since tried to find the Zip Zip books, in vain. There were at least a couple of them. Zip Zip and His Fying Saucer  was another. Zip Zip was a kid from Mars, who would punctuate his speech with occasional exclamations of "Zip!" which apparently was his way of venting excess "mental energy," or something like that, because human communication was too easy for him.) In the library of my grade school I found the Space Cat books by  Ruthven Todd, which I loved. I also came across the Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks (who also cr
Read more