I've been ramping up the writing again. Which is why I haven't been posting here after a flurry of entries a couple of weeks ago. See, I started ramping up the writing, and then began writing some projects that I hope to sell soon. Part of that ol' "professional writer" scene is actually getting paid for one's writing. (Not that I don't love writing for y'all for free, mind you.)

One of my new short stories has already been bounced in the best possible way (and I will likely develop it into a novel); another is likely to be sold (although one doesn't count one's chickens until they've come home to roost) -- I was asked for a minor revision, which I've done, so now I just have to wait and see if it passes muster -- and I just completed a third story which I feel pretty good about and I've submitted it to its intended market.

As is always the case with selling short fiction, it is likely to be weeks before I know anything about the disposition of the two that are still in play, but I feel good just getting stuff out there. Oh, and the piece that has already been rejected for its intended market is going to go back out to other markets shortly, even though I still plan to write its novel companion.

In the meantime, some light humor that I collaborated on with a friend of mine back in our *high school* days is about to be included in an anthology that will be published this coming April 1st. It's not my best stuff -- for that matter, it's not the best work that I produced in collaboration with this particular writing partner -- nor is it the material I would have chosen for the "Best Of" that it's going to appear in, but it's a book with a print run of 5,000 or greater, so it's still a publication credit.

And as a recent writing workshop reminded me, we are often not the best judges of our own work.

I'm glad to have finally gotten that third story finished this morning. I'm pretty sure that means my output for this year has already surpassed my fiction writing for all of 2007. Now let's see if there are some folks out there who would like (to pay) to read it.