Day: February 18, 2007

Delightful Invitations

By / February 18, 2007 / 27 Comments

Just before LTUE began, Howard was invited to be Guest of Honor at Ad Astra in Toronto Canada for 2008. Having Howard invited to a convention is not all that unusual these days. This invitation was different because Ad Astra is also buying a plane ticket for me to attend. I’m not sure how much that additional invitation is due to the fact that we know the current convention scheduler, (Hi Chani!) but I do know that the invitation delights us both. I get to go to Canada! To a cool convention! I’m going to be on panels! I’m very excited about this and I can’t wait for March 2008. My mom has already agreed to come to my house and watch kids so that I can go.

Then we attended LTUE and realized that one of the other GoHs was Julie Czerneda who is a Toronto local and regular Ad Astra attendee. We made sure to introduce ourselves and discovered what a delightful person Julie is. Howard shared a couple of panels with Julie, but I didn’t really get to meet her until Saturday afternoon. She and I ended up sitting together during the “gopher dinner” where all the gophers who’ve been running around for three days get a chance to sit down with the guests of honor. The gophers across from us were young and involved in their own giggly conversation, so Julie and I were able to talk. I was able to talk to her about the many anthologies she’s been involved in and how that process works, how she came to be published by Daw, and how many books she has in print.

Then Julie asked a little about me. I mentioned that I write Sci Fi and Fantasy short fiction. Julie’s eyes lit up and she immediately invited me to submit a story for her next anthology. She always holds one slot for a writer who has never been published before. I was both surprised and honored by the invitation. I suspect that she hands out lots of these invitations so that she has a large enough pool of submitted stories to choose from. The invitation-to-submit is by no means a guarantee that she’ll choose my story. But I am very certain that she does not hand out invitations randomly to everyone. She doesn’t want to read bad stories any more that any other editor. This means that something I did or said was sufficiently impressive that I merited an invitation. I’m so glad. Just getting the invitation makes me really happy.

I’ll be emailing her tomorrow to get my name put on the invitation list. Then the submission requirements will be sent out in 3-4 weeks and I’ll have until June to write the story. I will be writing a story for this. It may not get chosen, but I have to at least try. Submitting for publication will be a new and frightening experience for me. I’m both soaring and afraid to get my hopes up. I would love to go to Ad Astra next year with one of my stories printed in a Julie Czerneda anthology.

Things back into place

By / February 18, 2007

It never fails. When my days are filled with blogworthy events, I do not have time to blog. This becomes a problem because my head fills up with all the things I could write about. They all jostle in my head so that I have trouble articulating any of them. Fortunately The List has come to my rescue. I made a list of all the things that I want to blog about, this empties my head space so that I can actually formulate coherent thoughts.

LTUE, the science fiction and fantasy symposium at BYU finished yesterday. I got to go to some of it on Friday and Saturday I was there all day. Once again I met amazing people, had fascinating conversations, and got very excited about current and pending writing projects. This completely undermines my plan to focus on being support personnel for Howard’s new book. I need to figure out how to maintain excitement about my projects while still prioritizing the next Schlock book before them. I have to do this because Schlock pays the bills.

My writing projects also need to make way for my kids. Both Patches and Gleek are still sick. They missed me lots yesterday. Gleek called me on my cell phone four times to tell me how much she missed me and wanted me to come home. When I did finally arrive home, she was too busy playing to do more than give me a quick hug. Patches, who didn’t call me at all, clung to me. I sat with him in my lap while he told me how sad his day had been. We also discussed how much he missed me. He extracted a promise from me that I wouldn’t leave again without telling him. (I’d left in a hurry that morning.) I promised him that for the next two days I would not go anywhere unless I took him along too. That made him smile. He wouldn’t let me put him down until I had also agreed to change into my pajamas. Once I did, Patches relaxed. He had visible proof that I wouldn’t be going anywhere. I read him a story, then snuggled him until he went to sleep. Gleek was also relieved to know that I promise not to go anywhere without her for at least two days. I made that promise over the phone yesterday. When I reiterated it this morning, she smiled. Gleek doesn’t need the snuggles that Patches does, but having me nearby is a measure of security that she wants and needs today.

Since Patches and Gleek are both still sick, I stayed home from church with them. This means we have a space of blessed quiet while everyone else is gone. I love having Nancy and her kids here. I love having my sister from Boise and her family here. I love having my brother from Pocatello and his family here. But having them all at once gets a little bit chaotic. No. It gets a LOT chaotic. Add to that the fact that I’ve been away from the house for two days, and everything feels all out of place. I’m using this quiet everyone-else-at-church time to do some cleaning up. I’m clearing my brain by blogging a little and I’m cleaning up the living spaces so that I can stand to have so many people in them. I don’t want to evict any of the people until the visiting is done, but I can certainly evict the trash and banish the toys to their cupboards. That will make the visiting nicer.

Most of the crowd will be departing tomorrow. The Idaho families came down so that they could visit with Nancy who is only in the states every couple of years. Nancy and her two kids will be staying until Thursday. It will be nice to have some quiet routine time with her next week. And I think that by Tuesday, Gleek will be well enough to go back to school so that I can do some of the stuff I’d planned to do last week. Hopefully.