Not the most productive of weeks. The girlfriend and I both came down with the plague, leaving both of us less interested in writing. We spent the weekend sucking on cough drops and catching up on Lost. (We’re now only a season behind.) Monday and Tuesday were both shot between tripping on my cold medicine and discovering the horrible, horrible crack that is Plants vs. Zombies.

Also sapping enthusiasm is just… I don’t know, not feeling the writing love. Something just isn’t clicking. What I really need to do is just hit the keyboard

The girlfriend keeps finding places for me to submit, and I really need to get stuff done to submit.

I’ve gotten word back on my two submissions. 10 Flash kicked the flash fiction piece back for a rewrite. But she liked the concept enough that she was willing to give me a second shot. I’ve got about another week to get it tightened up and in fighting shape. I think I’ve got it, but I’m having a second pair of eyes look at it.

Tidy word managing has been kinda driving me nuts. My muse is an androgynous red-headed god of Chaos named Sam. He finds minutia beneath him and goes off to write sonnets with slugs and jelly beans while I’m stuck alone beating my head against the keyboard. I think it’s something I can learn to do, but good gods it sucks. It’s moments like this I wish I’d finished my English degree.

Crossed Genres turned down “It’s All Fun and Games,” which makes five in a row for striking out with them. The part that really stings is that the rejection email was almost exactly the same as the month before. I’m back to stock rejection emails. Guess it’s time to wipe off my streaked mascara and hang up my tiara.

Several of my peers are dogging me to submit to some place besides Crossed Genres, and I have stuff in the works (like my flash fiction), but “in the works” is not “done.” Crossed Genres was easy to submit to because the monthly themes were so inspiring, and a deadline kept me on track. Now I find that the next several months of “genres” for Crossed Genres aren’t doing anything for me. They’ve drifted off of genres and more into just themes. And that’s fine. If they didn’t want to repeat themselves, it was sort of inevitable. It’s just harder for me to get jazzed about themes. “Western” speaks more to me than “Lies.”

But now I have a mountain of deadlines staring me down, so I guess I need to stop jabbering here and get cracking.