So, I mailed off the first three chapters of my first complete novel to my first agent of choice on the morning of Thursday, May 16th. Yesterday, I had it back.

The agent's address had changed.

I knew this, of course. I had both his "old" (pre-move) business card and his "new" (post-move) business card. Lucky me, I just happened to use the wrong one to fetch the address. So, it was returned with a stamp "Moved, no forwarding address," and the postal carrier where I live managed to mangle the package pretty good by shoving it into our small mail cubby. It was so mangled as to be unusable to resend to the agent. So I printed it all up again (updating his address and the date) and mailed it out this morning. I called his office to verify that I was using the correct address, so I'm all set on that front.

Gotta reset the 6-8 week countdown for hearing back from the agent.

Because I managed to at least keep my commitment of sending out the manuscript by last Thursday (finally), I decided to practice making and keeping more commitments. This past Sunday, I committed myself to 1) beginning a brand new short story, and 2) sending out at least one short story -- both of which I committed to having done by Tuesday, May 28th.

I haven't written any new stories since I left Clarion last summer, although I have rewritten a couple and sent them out for consideration. I also didn't have any ideas for new stories I wanted to write. Thus the commitment to begin writing a new one wasn't trivial -- it's time to get the creativity engine engaged again.

Yesterday, I decided to allocate one hour to doing nothing but generate ideas for a new story. For ten minutes, I fidgeted. My eyes kept getting drawn to my bookshelf, and to a bunch of Dilbert books in particular. "Go ahead. Open up a Dilbert book at random. You'll find inspiration there," said a little voice in the back of my mind.

"Why?" I thought. "How could there possibly be inspiration in a three-panel comic strip?" Then I thought about The Dilbert Future, which contains a series of humorous essays about what the future might be like. There's one essay in there that was always my favorite, about how "The Future Will Not Be Like Star Trek." Scott Adams argues that if we ever invented such a thing as Holodecks, nobody would ever get work done ever again because we'd be too busy playing in simulated worlds... and that would be it for the human race.

...and *that* gave me an idea for a story. After fifteen minutes, I had it. I spent the next hour or so writing.

This is all by way of saying that there's power in making a commitment to yourself and then taking that commitment seriously. I'll write more on that subject (making and keeping commitments) soon. In the meantime, I'm going to have to decide which story I want to send out next....