So the title of “Productivity” is kind of misleading what since I’ve hand next to none of it lately. There’s the Catch22 of reading an especially awesome book. An epic book pushes everything else to the back burner and Shadow Ops is an epic book. Then Mass Effect 3 dropped on Tuesday. I enjoy myself my games and Mass Effect is one of the best games ever, right up there with Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Seriously, go check out this article from io9 about how Mass Effect is the most important sci fi universe out there. It was a significant point brought up in the Boskone Alien Character panel.
Worse for my productivity is that I got the big “Nah, don’t want that.” Rather than a form letter it was a one sentence email. Seriously? Don’t you have a form letter you could copy and paste? Oh well. It wasn’t even that my venue of choice did want it so much as what I found after. I found nothing. I went through that SFWA approved venue list and every thing that a story with a light horror bent would fit in was closed to submissions. I was actually still optimistic that I could just send it to another place until I just found no other place it would fit. So one is relegated to the figurative dusty shelf of the My Documents folder on my desktop and the other story I sent out hasn’t gotten a response either way.
Is what it is.
I got some productivity back in the direction of Novel Attempt 4. My next chapter is probably the most important one yet and marks a major turning point for two of the three main characters. I write with a lot of outlines and notes and scribbles. The outlines start out very broad so I don’t get lost and whenever I get stuck I’ll do a detail outline of the chapter of scene or whatever. I had the next section blocked out but it was missing something. I added a mess of more scribbles and then my wife was all like “Buh? You need to do more to make sense.” So she made me add the key parts that will make the chapter pop with epicness.
So I’m going to go make that happen, latch on to the momentum when I can get it. Sorry Mass Effect.
Mike Douton's Stuff and/or Junk 