Published and Paid!

Me!

I was!

OK, calm down. It's Tweet The Meat and it's for the princely sum of a dollar, and you can read it sometime next week on Twitter.

So, you know, only a potential audience of 8 million or so people.

However, paid for fiction! It might be 140 character fiction, but paid! Next ambition: paid for longer fiction! And also, I think I'll try and get published via Tweet The Meat again.

Right. Markets to research, things to write.

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Honestly, minds in the gutter, the lot of you.

Item! Twitter does something useful!

Yep. It unexpectedly recommended me some music. The Lost, in fact. Utterly unlike my normal playlist fare, I happened to mention on Twitter that I liked clever lyrics and lo! the chap behind The Lost suggested I might like his stuff.

He was right.

Item! Dave Buggered for Inspiration!

You know how it goes, sometimes. Well, it's done more than go, it's gone!

Item! Audiobooks of Note.

I bought the first of the Lankmar series, from Audible. Having never read Lieber (for shame! for shame!) I wasn't sure what I was in for. Now I think I'm hooked.

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The New Word Order

Back on April 1st, I instituted a real, honest to goodness competition.
When one comments, one is required to enter a random clump of letters to show one is not a spambot.

I have asked that commenters turn these into words and define them, with the very best winning something at the end of the year.

It's been a month - so how are we doing?

Eletingl - the creeping sense of horror you get when you suspect that a large animal has crept up on you very quietly and is now RIGHT BEHIND YOU.
- Lucy McGough

offacho: The kind of sneeze that makes you fall backwards from the bench you're sitting on.
- mand

saxirei: a complicated variety of clasp worn at the neck of Plyoogian cloaks and capes.
- mand

Armina - small Muslim country hiding in the mountains of Kazakhstan, hoping that no-one invades it. Exports horse-milk yoghurt and turquoise.
- Lucy McGough

frinessa: the state of being unable to distinguish between memories and dreams. Can occur when asleep or awake.
- Lucy McGough

dersh: the sound all that water makes when you close your umbrella suddenly
- mand

Noppr - Someone who, though tired beyond all reasonable measure, is prevented from taking refuge in sleep due to being sat at a desk (usually at work, though in the case of a noppree little work will actually be taking place).

Sometimes caused by being set a tedious task by your employer, or 'nopprific'...
- Graymalkin

mulneden, which is the practice of denying, while EITHER holding one's nose OR suffering a broken nose or nosebleed (though some authorities hold that mulneddlibbnen is the more correct term in the latter case), that one has recently ingested mulled wine.
- mand

So far so good. Keep commenting! And I'll attempt to post things that make you want to comment a bit more often, to keep the momentum going.

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Gubbins

Rather foolishly, I have more or less convinced myself that if I can get a few things out of my head I can go back to work and concentrate.

So here I am. Doing precisely what I want to do instead of what I should be doing, which is a wretched and guilt-laden thing. But as John Ruskin said "Labour without joy is base".

What I want to be doing is writing, as usual. I put together four submissions for Tweet the Meat, dispatched them and felt gleeful about it. There is something immensely satisfying about having completed work which does not extend to actual employment work itself. The answer is to become much more intense about the work I would prefer to be doing, so that it becomes the work I live on. That's going to be an amusing journey, because I have to become a lot less lazy.

There are an assortment of excellent things happening. Two pieces for Celestial Toybox are in the works (one almost done, one still in the planning stages), I'm researching a new market (links etc when I know what it's all about) and working towards finishing a short story that has been around for ages, which rather lost it's way. The last bout of mania kicked off a whole swathe of short stories which I now need to work on, including -

the "Time War" fics.
- a rewrite of "Daleks on Goth", which is now actually not bad.
- a fic about Dhiren Koduri.
- a fic about Roseli
- a fic provisionally entitled "Prisoner of the Daleks", which I now have to retitle because someone has written an actual Doctor Who novel with that title.
- I have to plan and write a fic about Tom the PostHuman, because that's the last part of the characters trilogy, and should be about the fall of Gallifrey, possibly.

Parting Gesture
- which has been "in the works" forever, and needs to be finished.

and a few other things that are currently no more than a frantic scribble or two and an enthused note.

In related happiness: Write Monkey is a lovely thing and those who would like a distraction free writing environment will find it useful. I'm enjoying it. I would be enjoying it a lot more if they made a version for Linux, and I might well make a perm. swap to Ubuntu 9.04, or the next LTS version, and use Write Monkey via WINE, or something similar.

In a week, I shall look back on this post and giggle at my optimism.

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