The Mystery of Short Titles
Finished up the latest draft of "M:EULA" this morning and will probably send it out in the next day or so. My first short story submission in about a year. This is the dull and meandering part of the gig: keeping the stories in the mail. I was never very good at it before; I kept looking them over when they came back in and my internal editor -- damn critical beast! -- kept hiding them from me and not allowing them to continue circulation. It's funny how much we second-guess our darlings sometimes. Though I feel much better about letting these children out into the wild than I did previously. That's what a little perspective gives you, I guess.
I've got a couple of reviews that need doing as well as a second draft of "MNSF." Technically, since I finished the first draft on that last week, I'm still short a story this week but I might let it slide and just work on this piece instead of trying to wrap my brain around something else. "MNSF" is going to need a bit of research to finish properly and, as we're out of town this weekend, it's going to be tough to get what I need onto the page.
Chapter 22 of the BOOK OF LIES is hanging there, patiently waiting for me to come back to it. I'm about to transition to the next section and I need to do some thinking on it so I'll probably let that continue to twist in the wind for the rest of the week.
I need to get back to "Instrument." I ran it through the Strange Horizons workshop and got enough positive comments on its potential as a novella (instead of trying to flesh it out to full book length) that I'd like to wrap that up and send it off in search of a home. One of the ideas that came out of the workshop was to do a series of linked pieces, a couple of novellas and short stories that could then be collected as a full book, a Maupin style Tales of Empire City. Detective Landres, a very bit player in "Instrument," told me last night that he wants to be the main character in "T,CSBY."
Sorry, don't mean to be so oblique about titles. A good title will do a lot to get you past the gatekeepers and, when a story isn't finished yet, I'm not so terribly keen on releasing the names of pieces into the wild. It's a poker face thing, I guess. But, at the same time, I don't want to reference stuff I'm working on SO obliquely that it comes out as "this story" and "that story." Even I'll be confused after a week.