Month: December 2015

Counting ink, 2015.

Now is the time for minutae-minded individuals to get bogged down in idly typing up details, so I’m posting about my reading and writing this year.

Reading

In 2015, I aimed for 70 books and finished 82, covering a total of 22535 pages.

Four of the books I read I five-starred on Goodreads, which is a rating I reserve for books that I think people should read even if they usually pass over that genre (A Gift Upon the Shore, “Sugar“, After the End, and Feeling Very Strange). The first is a novel, the second is a standalone short story (although it’s set in the Tabat universe, which also contains the really really lovely “Events at Fort Plentitude“), and the other two are anthologies.

Two of the books I read I two-starred, which means I did not hate them but pretty much stopped enjoying them and ground on to see if they would get better. If they had, I would have rated them higher.

And the oldest book I read this year was Fritz Leiber’s Gather, Darkness!, first published in 1943.

Writing

I submitted stories 56 times in 2015. I also got 49 rejections (one shy of a deciBrad, which I have decided is the correct term for ten centiBrads!), but three were from stories submitted before 2015, so you can say I only got 46 2015 rejections. (In 2014, those numbers were 34 submissions, and 31/30 rejections.)

I also got four acceptances, which was four more than last year. Or ever. Three of them have already been published; they’re linked over here.

This means I’ve got six stories out at the moment. I’m hoping to manage seventy submissions next year; will see how it goes.

Happy New Year! See you on the other side.

A desert is no place for ships/With all its dust and sand.

The anthology The Weird Wild West has been published, and my short story “Abishag Mary” is in it! You can read the opening of my story at this post on the eSpecBooks website (which has other excerpts as well); the anthology as a whole is for sale on Amazon, and a physical copy should be coming soon.

“Abishag Mary” is the story of a pirate who ends up starts out stuck in New Mexico, rather to her own surprise.

As always, I hope you like it.

Come and get some mercy.

Well, season 2 of Z Nation is complete and I am giddy.

There are other shows with zombies (I am pretty sure… although these days I’m only watching iZombie, and it kind of doesn’t count). There are other shows with pulpy, bright-and-quickly-drawn characters.  There are other shows with kind of cheesy premises that carry themselves through sheer momentum.

But.

Continue reading “Come and get some mercy.”

And that was even longer.

I thought there had been a few hectic days, and a bit of sick time, and the next thing you know I look around and it’s seven days to Christmas.

In my defense, there has still been no snow, and very little cold, and I am currently having a bit of trouble convincing myself that it’s actually December and very nearly the longest night of the year, rather than mid-October-with-less-daylight. Or April.

I hear that a mild lead-in to winter leads to an absolutely horrible February. I honestly can’t remember the last time we had a really mild December, but even if we just get a regular February with a couple of -40 days, it will come as a shock after this.

Honestly, there’s not a lot to say right now. This is, in part, an “I aten’t dead.”