RIP Norfolk Pine and World of Mirrors

The little Norfolk Pine I rescued from the neighbor's trash expired. It was not supposed to be exposed to temperatures less than 45 degrees, and I fear it maybe suffered even freezing or below. I rescued the 20 new ornaments, and now it looks like the giver has moved out and the giftee is hunkered down alone.

Am I I'm becoming a charicature little old lady that peers out from behind her shades?  I don't. At least not much.  We writers are always interested in a "story," and if there is a story happening next door, well, we speculate. And dramatize. I am always telling myself stories, in my dreams and in waking hours. Most of them I don't write down, but I remember them.

Some of them are sad. Some are funny. We went to the local flu shot clinic today, and while we were in line, Significant Other joked, "I don't hear any screaming." He spoke too soon. There were quite a few children and one perhaps six year old boy screamed bloody murder at the H1N1 shot, and then was lined up for the seasonal flu. Now logic would say, if hundred of people including kids were getting the shot, and none of them were so much as wincing, well, then, maybe the shot didn't hurt.

He was gripped by an unreasoning terror, and knew this would be the most painful thing imaginable. He yelled pretty loud, but not quite as loud when the seasonable flu shot was given. It reminded me of the day at the vet's (talk about stories) when a Vietnamese pig was given a shot. One understood immediately and viscerally the expression, "screaming like a stuck hog." Yup. That's what this kid sounded like.

So, World of Mirrors received its 97th rejection today, and I thought about formatting it for a sort of picky publisher or not. NOT. RIP World of Mirrors. But since so many people ask when the next book is coming out, well, WOM will soon get its own blog and I'll publish it in scenes along with photos and historical commentary, maps, whatever. I'll try to publicize this event and hope that readers will enjoy the experience. This is not what I had hoped for this story, which is really fun and exciting and a little different. Some agents and publishers didn't like it because the KGB played a minor role, and I wrote it when no one liked foreign settings, and now the technology is so old that it's a technology historical suspense yada yada. You can see that the subgenre is so sub sub sub that well, WTF?

If I get a lot of interest, I'll publish it on Amazon or Lulu or somewhere.
We made another trip to East Germany and I read about twenty books to do the research and get everything right. All for naught. I'll put a link to the story on this blog, and tweet it, facebook, yada yada. A media blitz, or sorts.

It actually feels like someone died, and I guess that was the dream and all that work, the blood, sweat and tears in vain. Sad. Sad.

Anyway . . . I'll persevere with the other books. This business of marrying technology to fiction turned out to be a major bummer.

Enough whining. Onward. After all, I 'm not the little Norfolk Pine put out with the post-holiday garbage.


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