Cleaning Up a Bit

Rather than writing today, I spent a couple hours getting my short fiction back into the marketplace. For too long, I've had 25-50% of my inventory sitting on my hard drive for lack of time getting them back out. It's easy to keep it out in the market if you turn them around within a couple days of rejection. If you delay, they can pile up. I think I submitted about fifteen stories and queried another six that had been out for an excessive length of time.

Right now, I have only two stories not in submission. One I'm considering using on the back of my business cards. The other is based upon the idea I worked at bootcamp. I'm picky where this might be published because I intend to expand it into a novel. It would have to be a major market or nothing for this one.

It feels good getting back to my normal status. 40 stories in submission. Hopefully my sales will pick up for the rest of the year. It's been very slow so far because it's hard to sell something that isn't being shopped.

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Today's plant is one of my jacarandas. It's the only one of my three that survived the nasty freeze during the winter of 2006-2007. The others I'll show in a few weeks are just babies.

I'm letting this one grow without training it for the time being. I want it to gain some more strength before I start hacking.

Jacarandas get clusters of purple flowers like the photo below, but this guy hasn't bloomed much since the freeze. I doubt my tree will ever get as big as this purple monster.