I rarely stop writing for long. Sometimes it happens — a lot of this summer has been a dry spell for me, partly because I’ve been ridiculously busy with a bunch of other things — but usually, what does shrivel up is not the writing, but the submitting of work. It takes constant energy to do final edits and proofreads, to check where you’ve sent things and where else you could try, and to actually send them.

This week I really need to print a few things and send out some print submissions, but I’ve taken advantage of places that take e-subs for the moment, and sent out three stories. But if you’re one of the many readers who realize I’m recording this mostly for my own benefi, you may refrain from reading the rest of this post.

Wow, you read on! Well, then, here’s what I’ve sent out:

• “Eight Days” (my Sado Seja story, to Haunted Legends)
• “Empty of Words, the Page” (my vaguely-unfaithful-professor-goes-nuts story, to Weird Tales)
• “Alone with Gandhari” (my wacky anti-fast food terrorists story, to Strange Horizons)

(While the first one is an anthology, the latter two are magazines I’ve never submitted to before, which is a cool step forward for me.)
All of that is in addition to a small sheaf of poems I submitted to Diet Soap a while back. So I guess I’ve got my submitting routine a little closer to back on track. At least, I figure this is a good start. Next I’ll be sending out a few more to other places. I think I’ll send “Vortex, Inverse” to Asimov’s, “The Broken Pathway” to Realms of Fantasy, and “Solvjaynghi’s Christmas Wish” to Fantasy.

I’m not quite ready to trunk “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” — it’s been a series of near-misses with that story at every place I’ve sent it, as in always a response that it’s very good, and almost right for the magazine, but not quite, so I’m confident it’ll get a home somewhere — but I’m still trying to figure out a place to send it. Tough sell, as it’s a bit dark, and violent, and has sexual themes, sort of a futuristic “Comfort Women” story. (One reason I haven’t tried it at places like Asimov’s and Strange Horizons… though for some reason I did try Analog, along with Clarkesworld and F&SF. I wish I wrote more shorter stuff, as I could try Clarkesworld more often.) Hmm. Well, anyway, I’ll think about it some more and have a look around.

As for what’s next in terms of actually writing — I’m tied up the rest of this month getting an academic paper done, and hopefully sketching the accompanying talk if there’s time. After that, I’ll be giving a try on another academic thing or two, but I’d like to finish a couple of short stories I’ve got going as well — “Ten Spikes and a Hammer” (WWII + geomantic warfare), and a significant re-edit of a story titled “Realer” (er, love/hate/love story in disguise), along with a couple of collaborations I have going now, and one or two to come — so that I can turn my fullest attention to getting A Killing in Burma back on track. I’ve no idea how long AKiB is going to be in the end, but there’s all kinds of potential in it. Maybe a short novel.And there’s a very disturbing story for which I finally have the perfect title: “Kawaii?”… shudder.

In the longer term plans, I should be revising “Comfort” (a ghost story I wrote at Clarion West) and integrating it into my novel-to-be-redrafted, Dead Abroad, as well as turning to a few other novellas & short stories I’ve got from times past, waiting for further editing. There are other ideas for other novels, and I’m considering diving straight into the stand-alone ones first just because the really big one/duology/whatever is going to require loads of research on my part.