A major award and a not-actually-failure to write.

One of my pieces got accepted again. It was a flash fiction piece called "Patience". It got accepted by Words and Images. They're going to pay me, too. According to Duotrope, they pay 1-4.9 cents per word. It's about 500 words long. Not bad, not bad. Also, they're from Maine, which is odd, because the only other place that's paid me so far was from Maine. What is it with Maine people and paying? I don't know, and I'm not going to question it.

One thing that pleases me is the statistics. According to Duotrope, they accept 4.48% of what they receive, and they only publish once a year. I find this somehow significant, because it means that I only had one real chance this year to submit it, and I succeeded. (So it's not like I could have sent them anything else later on in the year.) So I (sort of) beat the statistics, which I find somewhat comforting. A lot of the other places that accepted me came with statistics somewhat in my favor (30% acceptances or more). So this one shows me that I actually am rather a good writer (something I haven't really believed for a while). Right on (a phrase I have never used before and hopefully shall never use again).

In other news, I gave up my NaNo novel (if I didn't already post about that; I don't think I did). It was because every word was feeling like torture and I was ashamed of what I was writing, and if I were actually complete the bleeding thing, I'd be working on it long into December (it was going to be longer than 50,000 words). And I'd rather write things that I enjoy. To that end, I am writing some short stories involving two characters that were in the NaNo novel. They're doing things that have nothing to do with the novel itself (one story has them going to a small town and investigating the presence of Lovecraftian horrors that they believe are keeping the town in a constant state of fear; I want to write a series of stories where they investigate such situations). I don't know what I'll do with the stories. They're supposed to build up a sense of continuity that would be hard to appreciate by sending them to random literary magazines, so maybe I'll make a blog where each entry is a short story and have it as a sort of serial. I think that'd work. I don't know. I'm just going to continue my writing.

Oi. You guys. Look at this.

Here is a link to the site on which my first officially accepted piece of short fiction has been published today. That is, it's The Fast-Forward Festival, and this is the page on which they published my time-travel story "After Twelve". I'm quite pleased with it.

In other news, I am doing National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as it is often called). My story is called Things Stuck Together, and I am pleased with it so far. I am telling it in a rather confusing, amusing, experimental order, and I so far do not know if it is one of those stories where you would read the first two pages and say, "Oh, this is interesting, I wonder where it's going", or if it is one of those stories where you would read the first two pages and say, "Oh, this is weird, I have no idea what's going on, this is confusing, how can the first two pages be so confusing?" And...that's honestly all I'm going to say of it right now, mostly because there's nothing else I can really say of it right now. But yes.