I am Already Learning a Lot from the SFWA

1. It’s cool to remind people what stories you sold last year right about now. All the stories I sold last year were, weirdly enough, about Harpes and their heads. Ha.

–“Sarah Clark” at Eurynome 

–“Zilpha Murrell and the Third Harpe’s Head” at Beyond Borderlands

2. It’s not weird to send your stories back to markets you’ve already had success with.

3. Some people incorporate. Somehow. I haven’t read up too much about that.

4. I should probably be going to conventions. Well, I know nothing about conventions. So… yeah… I don’t know how that’s going to go.

But, as the Red-Headed Kid once so famously said, “I’m going to have to use self-promotion to promote myself.” So, I’m going to have to learn some of this stuff. Even if it makes me nervous.

On the other hand, reading through everything, I have apparently been doing everything wrong and I’ve had fun and gotten some things published. So, fucking up’s consequences–at least in this case–aren’t that dire.

The Coyotes are Down in the Valley

The coyotes sang to us all the way home on our walk. It was freaking us both a little out because they seemed to slowly be getting closer, but one of us was not so freaked out that he didn’t run off to the neighbor’s yard, grab something, and then hide behind a tree to eat it while I panicked that he was about to be eaten himself by coyotes.

Now he’s moping because he didn’t get a treat at the end of his walk.

My argument that bad dogs don’t get treats and that whatever the hell he had from Bobby’s yard surely constituted one hell of a treat anyway have failed to convince him. After all, the treat drawer is right here, just begging to be opened.

Yes, we have a treat drawer for our dog. Yes, we are dumbasses.

Not as dumb as the dumbass who doesn’t open the drawer and eat all the treats while we’re gone, but still pretty dumb.

I’m a fool for this dog, though I am trying very hard to not show it right now, because he’s so bad.

Also, the coyotes sounded almost like geese. Like if a goose and a firetruck had a bunch of babies who all sang to each other just north of you. You can tell it’s cold when they’re down here out of the hills. Normally, they stay far above us and we hardly notice they’re here.