Out to Pasture

Tomorrow is my last half-day at work. Seems incredible. All that code. All those meetings. So many conversions, implementations, integrations, hours, days, years, so many colleagues, so many late nights, all nights, trashed holidays, beepers beeping, phones ringing, emails pinging, users demanding. Nevermore.
One more paycheck. That is what's really scary.

Another scary thing is that I have been writing nigh on to 13 years now and don't have much to show for it except 5 novels, a few essays, short stories, poems, and what have you. Of those novels, only one is published. Many of the poems are published. Nothing else. Nada. Niente. Rien. Garnichts. Not jack shit. How much sucking it up is that? Muy. Sehr Viel. Beaucoup. Hell, I should have been a linguist.

Another novel half-finished, languishing through the holidays. Ideas for more. I gotta break out of this rut. Gotta geta new life. La vie nouveau, like Beaujolais, fresh and new.

Today, using my company's copy machine for the last time, a nice benefit soon to be gone, I made five copies of my short story to send off to the MWA anthology contest. The topic is "the burden of the badge." I have a sheriff with some burdens, not the usual ones, really. A skinny sensitive southern sheriff, playing off the stereotypes. This was a fun story to write, and I hope it gets to see the light of day somewhere. It's a story only I could have written. Is that a good thing?

No more agents reporting in on Promiscuous Mode. I have stuff from 12 months ago still out for World of Mirrors. I need to put in some serious time writing and promoting. Sales and marketing....yuck!

Tomorrow I'll take the beef rib bones and make beef barley soup. Think I'll bop out to the web and find a recipe. Cooking mistakes can be dumped into the garbage with only a pang.

Writing an unsaleabe novel. Guess it could be dumpe down the sink. Big time pangs! As in anguish. But why not make a curry out of that ragout? Spice it up a little. Everything looks good with chopped parsley on it. Maybe a bit of chopped cilantro? Some bacon bits?

Thursday we drive to NYC and pick up a very small visitor who will be with us for a week, then said visitor gets escorted back home. I won't be writing much before Jan. 10th. However, I will be blogging along with the breeze.

With nose to the wind,

Grapeshot