A veritable paucity of entries
Huh. I've only posted here three times in the past month, and not at all in the past two weeks. Odd.
Been busy, of course. Mostly magazine stuff. And day job.
A few bits and pieces:
- Most exciting news during that time: Last weekend, we hired a new fiction editor, Julia Rios, at Strange Horizons!
- (Well, okay, I suppose that three friends having babies in the past month is even more exciting news. Yay, babies! But I haven't met the kids in question yet, so the effect on my life is not as immediate.)
- I finally dealt with some tax stuff from last year (!) that's been looming over me all this time. Thanks to excellent accountant David Jones, it's all resolved, and I don't owe the IRS any money. An enormous relief. Parents, don't let your kids grow up to be procrastinators, especially about money stuff. Also, don't try to use Turbo Tax to deal with any out-of-the-ordinary tax situations.
- After resolving that, I moved on to working on this year's taxes; I had filed for an extension, and I thought I was going to owe them a bunch of money (which I paid them at the time), but it turns out I don't. Also very pleasing.
- Got some recognition at day job for some of the work I've been doing; also pleasing.
- Attended an After Hours evening at the Tech museum the other night, with Lori and Dawn and Kam and Dave. There was fun stuff (giant-sized Jenga, astronaut-jetpack simulator, electric car from 1908!), but the loud music wore me out relatively quickly.
- Finished reading A Civil Contract in spare moments. Liked it, but didn't love it, alas. The Grand Sophy remains unchallenged for the crown of Jed's Favorite Heyer Novel. And I think I may be done with Heyer, at least for now; it's all starting to feel a little too similar.
- Tried out various Scrabble variants with Lori. A couple of promising ones, but need more testing before I post about them.
- Have been occasionally watching Hill Street Blues episodes with Kam; have been rewatching Gilmore Girls episodes while entering subs into the database; have caught up on Nikita.
- (And May 1 marked the twentieth anniversary of a certain Beltane on the beach.)
- Worked on an essay with Mary Anne.
- Started figuring out summer travel plans. WisCon at the end of May, followed by a week visiting M in Chicago; a week with college friends in upstate NY in July; I think that's all I've got planned so far, but of course would like to make it to Boston, LAX, Seattle, PA, Portland, etc. We'll see. Oh, and fingers crossed that the voters in Washington state vote to allow my uncle to get married, in which case I'll definitely be heading up thataway. (Btw, if you want to help ensure that my uncle can get married, please donate to Washington United for Marriage.)
I think that's pretty much the story of my April. The vast majority of my time outside of work has involved magazine stuff.
We've collectively rejected over 1400 stories since reopening in mid-February, with an average response time of 10.3 days, and as of tonight our oldest unresponded-to story has been with us for only 36 days. And submission volume is gradually going down; we're only hitting the submission cap about half the time now, and almost always after being open for at least twenty hours on a given day.
And yet I'm somehow still behind, and my house is a mess because I haven't taken the time to clean up in a couple weeks. Not sure how that happened; the past couple of weeks have disappeared into something of a fog.
May be partly due to my being pretty short on sleep. I think I've mostly been averaging about 5.5 hours of sleep a night for a while now.
Anyway. This is enough for tonight. I'm gonna go do a little editing, then try and get an approximately full night's sleep for once.
PS: Sorry to have been so out of touch with almost everyone. Hoping to have a little more time again soon.
