Death, Centaurs, and the NaNo

Jane Lebak's latest blog post highlights one of my own fears, that I will die before I manage to get everything written down. As it stands, the mythology in my head is very broad, and I have no clue when I will find the time to finish it all. My only hope is that somehow I'll be able to write full time, but that's a big hope.

I'm getting ready to start my part of a collaboration with my girlfriend. We're doing a romantic novel set in a parallel world where centaurs are subservient to those that live in a country called The Affiliation. There is a place to the west, called Mandaroza, where they are free, but our characters never really go there. Rather, the novel, which we are calling Canter at the moment, is about the daughter of one of the Affiliation's Judges, their lawgivers, and her sudden attraction to the centaur, Jake, that she has owned since childhood. We both have rather high hopes for it.

I sent off to three more paying markets last night. One of them was a simultaneous submission, which I didn't fully realize until after the fact. The publication I submitted it to last night didn't care about simultaneous submissions, but I can't see if the first one did or not. It makes me feel even worse, since the first one actually sent me an e-mail to say that they are seriously considering my work. We'll just have to see how that works out, I guess.

TweetDeck on my computer has stopped working properly, adding one more item to the long list of things I would like to set on fire. That really disappoints me. I liked TweetDeck, before it stopped informing me when people I follow Tweet. And, Neil Gaiman uses it, so that made me feel even cooler for using something he uses. Oh well. I might try to reinstall it, but if not, I'll just have to use the web like everyone else.

My NaNo editing is coming along very well. I'm actually adding chapters. For a while I considered just leaving it as one long continuous narrative, or just dividing it up in the middle, and I may still do that. But, for potential publication purposes, I'm putting in chapters. I'm really happy with it. My girlfriend's sister is an editor at a publishing company, so I've been really working with it in the hopes that I can send it off to her. Don't know how well it will do, but it never hurts to try.