Another Publication!

My week is getting off to a good start already. My story ‘One’ was published this morning on Daily Science Fiction, and I have to say it’s a handsome thing. It’s great to see a story in its finished state, formatted and laid out to a publisher’s specification; it almost makes the content of the story seem better, too. It’s a long way from the day I first started tapping it out on my battered old laptop, months and months ago.

If you’d like to read the story, you can go here. Thrillingly, this time around, there’s an option for you to rate the story from 1 to 7, depending on how terrible you think it is. Currently, I’m holding steady at 5.4 average, so have fun skewing those stats!

I imagine the city Unubert lives in to look a little like this…
Image: blog.zeemp.com

Today is a Bank Holiday in my fair isle. Most people, I would wager, are still abed. This is a shame, because they’re missing a beautiful morning. We had awful weather yesterday – not as bad as parts of the UK, which suffered the fury of ‘St Jude’, the winter storm they decided to nickname after the saint of lost causes – but today, the sky is blue again.

I hope good weekends were had by all? I met up with some of my old university friends on Saturday, which was wonderful. It was so much fun to slip straight back into our early twenties, as happens when we’re all together, and forget for a while that we’re not that young any more and our lives have all changed beyond recognition. It did me good to remember what it felt like to have nothing more than getting to your next lecture to worry about, and I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard in quite a while.

So, all in all, it was the perfect cure for a fraught week.

I’m feeling a lot better now, too. You might remember me saying I felt unwell a few days back, and that I wasn’t able to focus on the computer screen, and all that. Well, thankfully it turned out to be nothing serious – the optician diagnosed me with eyestrain. Part of the reason I know the day is bright and blue outside is because I’m making a point of looking out the window every few minutes, just for a few seconds at a time, in order to flex my lenses. That wasn’t the term the optician used, but I just like to imagine it that way.

LIFT and stretch and LIFT and stretch and LIFT…
Image: generalcomics.com

So, today will be spent ‘dividing my time’ (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase…) between my NaNoWriMo prep (my brain has been invaded by an entirely new idea, which is clamouring to be written), my efforts to write a story for the Walking on Thin Ice Short Story Contest, and spending a bit of time with that man who lives in my house, whathisname… oh yeah, my husband. So, you know. It’s going to be a busy one.

Happy Monday! Remember to keep those eyeballs supple and those typin’ fingers flying…