Once again I've gotten behind on my blogging.
Mark and I recently celebrated our fourteenth year marriage anniversary. We got each other nice little gifts and treated ourselves to a fancy dinner out (the fancy dinner also combined with his birthday celebration. It's not all rainbows and unicorns, but being married to Mark makes me a better person, and I hope that I bring as much joy to Mark as he brings to me.
Today is pleasant (70-80F) and the sky is clear; but the previous weeks have been in the mid 90's, with a lot of haze from a large fire south of the Willamette Valley. The smoke is not as bad as it was last August, but there's still enough smoke and dust and pollen in the air that I wake up with runny eyes and nose.
The gym... has gotten out of my routine, and I need to fix that. On the plus side, my left elbow joint feels much better. On the minus side--and I wish it were a little more minus--I think I've gained about five pounds. Certainly my girth has summoned my abdominals to siege.
Writing... on the plus side, I submitted a short story to a market. It's a good story, and I expect it's chances are as good as previous stories I've sent out -- which is to say I expect a "this is a fine story but we're going to pass for unarticulated reasons" rejection. In the minus side, I looked at the word-count report for the novel . . . and I'm about ready to chuck the whole thing. The writing has become mechanical and the plot sort of "a day in the life." Sigh. Well... OK, maybe not chuck the whole thing; there's probably four or five short stories hiding in there, so maybe I should rework the corpus into linked stand-alone stories.
Casting back to longer pieces... I've got one long piece that has been alternatively critiqued as visually stunning an descriptively exhausting -- I suppose technically it's ready to send out, but I've been reluctant to because the negative critiquers' voices have been stronger. I've got a series of five short first-encounter stories which straddle the boundary between short story and chapter -- and I haven't looked at them in about a year because I had a sense that most critiquers hated them or were confused by them. I've got a stalled novella that deals with some sexual taboos, and I need to figure out why I keep backing away from it -- which is tied up with wanting to write about male sexual pleasure without the piece sliding into erotica/porn. I've got an attempt at a science fiction novella/novel length story that has been living in a drawer for over four years... which stalled out and I'd have to remind myself why, but I think I was trying to do too much. I suppose there's some writers' guide to not stalling one third of the way into longer pieces that I need to read.
Taking the long-view.... I found the latest round of "we're not looking for/we can't use this story" rejections has been really frustrating and it's almost enough to make me want to give up on writing. On one hand, I know I could do better market research, but on the other hand it seems like the stories I want to write simply aren't popular with paying markets.
Oh well. On a more cheery topic, I've been able to take some nice pictures of the moon and architectural details.
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I've been going to the gym this last week. Alas, the four extra pounds that I picked up during my absence are sticking around. I've been avoiding the machines downstairs to keep from straining my shoulders and elbows, slicking to about 30 minutes on the elliptical and about fifteen on the seated cable row machine (set to 5 our of 10 resistance level). I will have to ease into some free-weight work.
