Reading, Writing and...Submissions?

Spent most of the month catching up on reading. After hearing the name George R. R. Martin mentioned a lot (and seeing him in a photo standing next one of my favorite authors Fred Saberhagen and a bunch of other SF&F giants) I thought it past time I checked out his series, A Song of Ice and Fire. So I logged onto my local library and reserved A Game of Thrones, read it and am now halfway through A Clash of Kings. I'm enjoying it a lot though I'm having to resist the occasional urge to make editorial comments. Not that the writing is bad, but I've been doing so much editing of late that it's hard to turn the editor off.

I'm also halfway through Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a jewel of a book with sly sense of humor and a wonderful Victorian style. My cousin had loaned it to me, but on the way home from a trip I stopped by an outlet mall at a 75% off store I know of and picked up their only copy, a hardback, for $5. Quite a find!

I'm afraid I haven't done much writing at all this month. I'm still banging my head over where I want to go with my nanowrimo project from Nov. (among other projects.) I came to a major turning point just before I hit the 50k mark and now that I've so thoroughly blown up the main character's world, I'm not quite sure where I'm going to go next. I'm afraid I've frustrated him so much that he doesn't have any real options left. I'm going to have to introduce some, probably by introducing a whole bunch of new characters.

The only progress on anything I can report is that my friend Bruno (one of my editorial subjects) pushed me to submit something, so I sent out little piece of flash fiction. I'm not holding my breath. I don't see much point in submitting short fiction anyway. It's not worth the time and expense of submission, but it was pretty much ready to go, so away it went. We'll see what happens.