In which I have nothing much to report

It's been a month since I sent out my first queries for the novel.  And of the original six queries I sent, I've so far had one rejection (yay, first agent rejection!) and a whole lot of silence.

This is not a complaint, I hasten to add.  For one thing, the agents I queried were pretty much unanimous in claiming a 6 - 8 week response time on queries, and we haven't even reached that milestone yet.  For another thing, last week was Frankfurt Book Fair which will not only have impacted the reading of the slush pile while it was on, but the weeks before it will have been filled with prep work and now they'll be filled with follow-up.  My query won't be getting read and rejected until the dust from all of that has settled.  So we wait, and we have a little freakout every time the email notification appears on our phone, and we find other things to do in the meantime.

I responded to that one rejection by sending out another query to another agent somewhere else.  I also sent another one out today, just because I'd had a microscopic chat with the guy on Twitter the other day and I wanted to query him before I lost the tweets and couldn't remember who he was any more.  I've also finally gone back to sending out my short stories and acquiring more rejections for those too.  The Rejection Collection is coming along beautifully these days.

And it's only a week until NaNoWriMo!  I have pages upon pages of worldbuilding, and character notes, and story beats, and with luck by the end of November I'll have another first draft that's worth polishing up into something more.  That's assuming we haven't all perished in a nuclear war by then, of course...

In which strange things are afoot at the Circle K...

Things are happening at the moment.  Some of them I can't talk about, not least because those are the ones where I don't actually know what's going on myself.  I have my suspicions, but they're so wildly implausible that I'm sure I must be wrong.

But I didn't just come here to be intentionally mysterious.  There are things that I can talk about, like the fact that I'm about to start learning to support some new stuff at work.  We're being given stuff to do with Enterprise Service Bus, TIBCO and XMLM messaging.  It all seems a bit daunting at the moment, but then it's not been that long since I was having to learn COBOL from scratch, so I'm sure I can handle it.  And it all ties in nicely to my team's general conviction that we're the only ones who actually get stuff done.

Also new is the cat that's currently curled up asleep on the sofa next to me.  I'd take a picture, but he's solid black so photographs don't come out well, especially when his eyes are closed.  His name is Garrus, he's about three and a half, and he is the Softest Cat Ever.  Soft as in his fur, but he's also extremely placid and fond of company.  We acquired him from a friend who's about to move to Sweden and can't take him along.

Last but not least, I have multiple stories out acquiring rejections these days.  I've got quite a fine collection that I'm lovingly curating.  So far, only one story has been a disappointment and actually got itself accepted somewhere...

Yes, that's right, I'm having a story properly published.  It will be appearing in the very first issue of Shoreline of Infinity, which is due out next month.  Clearly fame and fortune beckon from here on in.  I'd be up for a Hugo next year if I hadn't foolishly made the protagonist a Japanese woman...

It's been six weeks since I first submitted that story and...

...I now have not one, not two but three (count 'em!) rejection slips to my name. Apparently I'm not having much luck finding a publication that needs a story featuring a wisecracking penguin with a Bronx accent and its eyes scratched out. Go figure.

Still, I shall continue to persevere. There's always a chance that somebody, somewhere, is desperate for more penguin-based fiction. And since the alternative is to post it here, to be read by maybe three people, it's not like I'm missing out on much. (The three of you who would have read it may feel differently, of course...).

In the meantime, when I'm not sending that one back out to be rejected somewhere else, I'm working on other things. The novel continues to be very slowly edited, there's another short story gradually coming together, and I'm currently obsessing over a project that I already know won't go anywhere (as opposed to merely suspecting such things).

The idea in question, unfortunately, is one of those that really needs to be a comic. Prose simply wouldn't do it justice; it needs big, bold visuals to tell the story properly. And I can't do big, bold visuals. If I try really, really hard, I can produce something that's about half-decent, but it's just not worth it for the amount of stress and effort it requires. And while I know one or two people who can draw, I doubt any of them would be interested in taking on a project of this magnitude with no guarantee that it would ever be seen by more than three people (hi, three people! I love you!).

I'll have to work on it regardless, though. I need to get it out of my head and pinned down on a page before I can move on to something else.

And if you know anyone who might fancy drawing 120 pages of quirky, grim superhero stuff just for the lulz, do send them my way.