Thinking a lot gets very tiring

Seriously. I put in a good week’s work and by the end of every day I feel wiped. Not quite as bad as Sgt. Rock, but still exhausted. But it is, as they say, a good tired. I even got in slightly more hours than I’d planned to, which will make up for whenever my schedule goes south later this month.

I added 4,ooo words to my rewrite of Let No Man Put Asunder. It’s holding together surprisingly well considering I’m really pantsing it — finish one scene, think what comes next, jump on that. It may turn out I’ve plotted myself into an unworkable hole but it’s going A-OK so far. Fun too.

I worked on Mage’s Masquerade which has reached the point I need plotting rather than pantsing. I think I’ve solved the main flaws in the last draft and I got halfway through the next one.

I worked on a werewolf comedy short story, Inherit the Howling Night, but I’m not sure there’s a story there yet. Or maybe ever. But I’ve thought that before and proven myself wrong after a few more drafts. Another (untitled) story — an unusual riff on Jekyll and Hyde — has characters and a message, but no real plot. Hopefully I can find one.

I finished Bleeding Blue and sent it off to F&SF. I admit I’m not hopeful — I’ve never gotten better than “Thanks, try again some time” but why not start off with a prestige market? And hey, even with a no, that’s my first finished short story of 2023, already subbed. Regrettably the market-guide website Ralan.com shut down this week — they were easily the best guide to which markets were open, when new markets started up and so on. There are alternatives but none I like as much.

I looked at Shopify, the online-sales app, and it should be doable to integrate it with this website. By the end of the month I hope to have stuff up for direct sale. Doesn’t mean anyone’ll be buying but as with F&SF, there’s no reason not to try.

And my new plan for managing email — basically devote an hour at the end of the week to going through whatever hasn’t been opened — is working well.The romance anthology Starlit Bridges is now out, with my Wodehouse Murder Case included. You can buy it in ebook or paperback. And I have more Con-Tinual panels available, one on writing in the Roaring Twenties, one on how to write psychic detectives, as in Questionable Minds.