Virtual Tales

It's official!  I have a contract with Virtual Tales to publish my novel, Remnant in the Stars!

If an astrogator leaves with the humans, his absence could harm his youngest child, but he could find not only his missing daughter but also forgiveness for himself.

New News!

I've been away for a while.  School has kept me busier than a 1-armed wallpaper hanger, but there wasn't much of note to report.  We're entering TAKS season.  That's the state-mandated testing, and since they're changing the test to the STAAR test next year, this year's ratings will hold for two years while everyone learns to adjust to the new test.  There's a lot of pressure to get good numbers because they hold for so long, so I've been eyeball deep in trying to arrange interventions and remediation and extra help for the collection of little donuts in my crowd while trying to keep behavioral goofiness under control. 

It keeps me busy, but it's not very interesting.

Then I had a new development this week that IS very interesting.  Back in August or so, I submitted proposals for 2 novels to different publishing houses.  Both are pretty small.  I never heard anything from one.  The other publisher asked for the full manuscript of the one I sent that way, but then seemed to disappear.  I received an email this week from Virtual Tales.  They've been trying to reach me since November, but between their spam catcher and mine, nothing got through until the marketing director used her personal email account to send me a note. 

Virtual Tales offered me a contract on Remnant in the Stars!  :-D 

After checking over the contract and doing a little more research, I signed it and sent it back. 

I'll post about this new adventure as things develop.  Exciting times ahead!

Drama

There's a new trend in education suggesting that from middle school on, boys should be in a school with only boys and girls should be in a school with only girls.  It's a nice theory, but I don't think it'll work in practice.  The idea is to get the kids in a situation where they only consider their education, not the opposite gender.  Some one-gender-only schools are getting started, and I feel sorry for the teachers at the all-girls schools.

Yes, it's true that boys get more boisterous.  I've had years when the guys outnumbered the girls in my class 2:1, and class control was a challenge.  I'm sure that when you throw in a few extra years, that gets even more exciting, but problems between guys are generally more obvious.  They telegraph themselves an hour before they arrive and when things blow up, it looks like a whole lot of pushing and shoving and smacking things.  The problems are all out in the open and they're easier to defuse and deal with.

Girl problems are sneaky.  The drama is exponentially increased.  Things fester under the surface for days, weeks, months, even years before BOOM!  It all blows apart like Mt. Vesuvius.  Out of nowhere you get cat fights and name calling and general all purpose backbiting over stupid things like "she stepped on my shoelaces" or "she won't play with me" or "SHE is the friend of HER and WE don't like HER so SHE can't be our friend either."  Teachers end up spending 90% of their time putting out the fires after these explosions and dealing with ticked off parents who call and demand to know why the teacher hasn't dealt with a problem the teacher didn't even know about because it hadn't reached the explosive stage yet.

Argh.  Well, that'll have to work itself out while I try to stay neutral.

In the meantime, I'm still working on my writing adventures.

ACFW (American Christian Fiction Writers) is sponsoring a writing contest for those who haven't published anything in the last 7 years.  I'm going to enter it, so I've been working on my contest entries and pushing onward with Bird's Eye.  A critique partner just clued me in on some facts of military engagements that I knew nothing about.  Namely, when you take on an enemy in an entrenched position, expect casualty rates >80%.  O.o  Yikes.  I knew it was high ... but not that high.

That makes my current plot ideas unrealistic and unworkable, and that may take a significant rewrite of the ideas I had for the last half of the book.  O.o  Better to find these things now than before I spend a couple gazillion hours writing a draft I have to chunk the back half of.

Free for a Fortnight!

I don't think kids realize how much teachers look forward to breaks, too.  I am just ecstatic that I can get away from the school ratrace for a couple weeks.  I have a couple more chores to do, such as print up homework stickers and type up a new spelling center, but other than that, I'm out of there!  Whoot!

The last couple days were a zoo, naturally, but I survived and so did the kids.

During this break, in addition to the holiday festivities, I plan to continue working on Bird's Eye, the tale about the parrot and her boy.  The plot has hit the point where I was when I aborted the last attempt, and I'm having trouble with it again.

See, the characters traveling a lot right now, and the story sounds repetitious.  Even shenanigans from the bad guys sound like the same thing.  I have some ideas for breaking the monotony.  One is just to jump forward in time to when the reach the next city and just take a miss on the how-did-they-get-there part. 

Fortunately, drafts are cheap and easy to revise, so I'll keep going, look for interesting ways to make it more interesting, and go back and edit the junk out later.

In other publishing news, I never heard back from either publisher on the two I sent off just before the school year got rockin' and rollin'.  I think that's a "no."  Hey, at least they're both still in business. I've had a few opportunities where I've submitted something ... then the company went out of business.  Oops.

Not Safe for Humans out There

Wow...  So far this month, someone's helped me check my brakes twice, I was almost side-swiped by a grandma who didn't check the next lane before she moved into it, and I've gotten pushed out of the way and all but knocked over by people in a rush while I was doing crazy things like trying to run errands.  People are in a terminal rush to get here, grab that, and get on to the next thing on the list.

Nah, this isn't going to turn into a harangue about the real reason for the season.  Wouldn't do any good anyway.  Everybody's heard it and most give it intellectual assent even if that doesn't show up in their actions.  The rest have bigger problems, like doing the Christmas thing because it's a tradition, not because they have any belief in the little baby born in a manger (probably in September/October, not December, but *shrug*)

There really are 12 months in a year.  How about instead of getting all stressed out and just about killing people in December, spread the holiday cheer out.  Do some of your shopping in January or even June for the following December.  Don't worry, the holiday themed stuff will be available.  After all, in most stores, you can tell it's almost 4th of July when you start seeing the Christmas decorations for sale.

Maybe if folks did that, I wouldn't have to get squashed by lunatics in the store while trying to collect my groceries for the next week.

The End of NaNoWriMo

It's official.  I got to about 55K words and validated, so I'm now an official "winner!"  Whoot!  The story isn't finished, but my adventures in NaNoWriMo are for this year.  My next goal will be to finish the story and get it edited and published.  The first two parts aren't so hard.  That won't happen in the month of December because I have other priorities, but it'll happen.

The last one?  Maybe it'll take a while.  Maybe it won't.  That's in bigger hands than mine.

NaNoWriMo Update

With only 9 days to go, I'm way ahead of the slope.  I'm at 40K words.  There's no way the story will be finished at 50K, but that's all right.  It doesn't have to be.  The deal is to write 50K words of a novel, and that I can manage.  I may have another 50K to go later, but that's later.

For now, the two POV characters have met one another and aren't sure what to make of each other.  The two human characters haven't exactly met yet.  One of them was injured and still working toward recovery.

I got that far ahead for a very unfortunate reason.  I can't take flu shots because I react to eggs, so I had to get my antibodies the old-fashioned way.  I got the flu.  So, in between naps, I worked on NaNoWriMo. 

I'm doing much better now.

Off to go enter the next installment of the novel.