One Hot Mess

I remembered the other stuff I wanted to blog about. It's actually not that interesting, but it involves making lists, which I like.

So Kyle is going to stay with his mum for a week soon. Not sure when yet, but early July as we have a wedding to go to in late July. I'm hoping if the timing works out, I can take that week off work and have some "me" time. I'm supposed to give two weeks' notice for holiday, so ideally Kyle needs to book his train tickets on Friday for the second week of July. Even if I can only get a long weekend, I'll take it. I need it.

I have a ton of writing commitments going on right now, and I need some extra time to get back on top of those. First priority is obviously Night Breed, which I have fallen behind on.

Immediate urgent stuff alongside Night Breed is:

Queered Fiction horoscopes (will do those tonight).

Wicked Witchery - the anthology is at the lower word count limit for publication now. I'm waiting for one more author who's doing some revisions on a story, but I'm thinking I'm going to put the end of June as the deadline for submissions. I'm going to take a break from editing any more SM anthologies until Night Breed is done.

Critiquing - I've got two pieces from writer friends I'm reading over and I'd like to get them wrapped up before much longer. Happily for me, they both seem to be fabulous thus far.

Other writing stuff that is not urgent is:

Snakeskin, a novella I've been playing with as a sequel to a novella called Snakebite that I submitted to Damnation Books a few weeks ago
(21st of May, as it happens, not that I'm anxiously counting off the days or anything). Snakebite clocked in at around 13k, so really short, but I liked it and I'm interested to see if someone else likes it, so I thought, why not submit it somewhere? So I did. I imagine Snakeskin will be around the same length, and if the first part gets picked up, I'd like to have the second part ready to submit straight away. I'm about 6k in at the moment.

Blood Romance - a longer novella set in the same world as THE NECROMANCER'S APPRENTICE. It's really low down the priority list, but I do want to finish it and, at some stage (probably next year now), write a second novella featuring Morrow and Evanthe.

Blood and Bones - ideally I'd like to finish that off this year, but having assessed my schedule and thought about where I want to focus my writing efforts, I don't plan to publish it until February 2012, a year on from NIGHT AND CHAOS.

Halflife - I'm planning to pick this up as my next "big" project after Night Breed is done, and hopefully crack on with it during Anti-Nano this year (I'm doing Anti-Nano again, regardless of whether anyone else is).

Other writing stuff I haven't actually started yet but am planning to:

Caged - the second Vargulf book. This is almost definitely going to have to wait until 2012.

Another Ethan Banning novella - I have plans for Ethan. Possibly evil plans.

Two more Theo Kane short stories - PAINLESS is roughly 5k, I think I could manage two more stories that length this year.

Around all that, there will be edits for DARK HUNT (we're aiming for a late summer/early autumn 2011 release as far as I know). I will have to crush my desire to write Arkham Horror fanfiction until at least 2013.

No more work until October 11th! Huzzahs! That's a whole week of nothing but doing whatever I want to do, and what I mostly want to do is nothing. Well, there are plans. But they're fun plans, so it's okay.

The Plan - Writing

1. Finish my steampunk story, Dr Dewson's Analytical Soul Decipherer, for submission to Static Movement's steampunk anthology.
2. Finish critiquing a friend's novel for her (it's fabulous!)
3. Get cracking on the Scarlett novel, which still needs a title. I've got about 2k already; I'd like to have added to that by the end of next week.

The Plan - Miscellaneous

1. Apparently on Monday we are hosting a Ross Noble/The Human Centipede night. I can't imagine The Human Centipede improves on a second viewing or anything, but it seems I can't stop it happening. At least there will be Ross Noble to make it better.
2.chaostheory  has cocktail vouchers! I have a great love of cocktails! It's a match made in heaven.
3. I would like to teach Ket not to use me as a toilet. Or at least I would like to teach him he can also use Kyle as a toilet, should he choose. I'm not sure exactly how I will achieve this, but it may involve buying a flute for snake-charming or something. 

So. We have moved! Mostly. There are still a few bits and pieces at the old house, like my curtains, but they're going to be collected at the weekend when we do the Massive Epic Clean-up of Doom. But all the important stuff is at the new house, like my books and laptop. I'm exhausted today - really wish I could have stayed in bed, but the day job called, and I left the house stupidly early because I wasn't sure how long the new trip to work would be... and as a result I was still the first person here by a good fifteen minutes, so now I know *shrug*

Anyway. The new place is brilliant! Turns out the kitchen is fully stocked with mostly new equipment, so we could get rid of a lot of our battered pots and pans and blunt knives. Turns out we also have a garden. I know! After all my bitter invective agains the old garden! But this one is tiny, and is probably going to be completely slabbed over, which suits me fine. It's actually behind the house behind us, so it's not like we could even get a lawnmower to it anyway.

We also discovered (with much rejoicing) a pizza takeaway on the high street that does curry pizzas. Curry pizzas! Lamb balti pizza FTW! Still haven't mastered the shower, however, which apparently will either be icy cold or dangerously hot, but nothing in between. And there are still lots of boxes of books sitting around waiting to be shelved, not to mention a stack of clothes, none of which I remotely recognised. I realised with some sadness that I have maybe four or five mix-and-match work outfits, and the rest of the time I either wear my Disturbed hoodie or my Run DMC t-shirt depending on the time of year, which means I have a whole wardrobe full of clothes I never, ever wear. And lot of them are too small for me at the moment, which I guess is further incentive to lose weight, as if any were needed...

Anyway. So. Yes. We can haz new house. And chaostheory  can haz new house too, so all is well! And I totally didn't wake up in the night, hear the neighbours moving around, assume it was her, and then get sad when I remembered it wasn't. Totally. In the mean time, Kyle and I are enjoying the grown-upness of having an actual house with an actual upstairs and downstairs. We were all "we have a staircase! This is really adult! Let's get a zombie shower curtain!" I'm envisioning something like this:

 You said without photos it didn't happen*. So, here's the new hair! I'm not sure why I look so evil in the third picture.