Bubble and Squeek for 14 Oct 2014

Looks like insomnia and I are close friends these days. Instead of lying in bed and wishing I was asleep, I thought I’d give you a “State of the Jenn” post. Had surgery. Started to recover. Got sick. Not surprising after two surgeries and a convention within three months. Recovered from being sick just in time to go to Westercon. It was a quiet convention but a convention nonetheless. Thus, it killed my productivity in my already running late schedule. Now that the convention has been over for ten days, I feel like I’m starting to catch up. This catching up on has been on “actually late” stuff and not “Jenn’s idea of a schedule running late” stuff. I’m still behind but things are getting better. I should have Gruntz fiction off my plate by the end of the week. I should have the Coins of Chaos anthology stories read...

Today Kris Katzen talks about what it is like to discover you share a Table of Contents with one of your favorite authors. Dreams, Fantasies, then Beyond… To quote my bio, I wrote my first ‘novel’ (seven handwritten pages!!) at age seven. As a kid, the only thing I did more voraciously than write, was read. Ok, maybe they tied. Either way, I lost myself in books. Drove my mom nuts. She’d be standing literally right beside me and I would not hear her calling my name until the third time. Drove. Her. Nuts. So I read. Tons. And among my most favorite authors, Andre Norton loomed large. I favored science fiction and fantasy even then and loved her wonderful novels. The older I got (and the more I learned about the publishing business) my idea of making a living as a writer…shifted. But that didn’t bother me. I write...