Writing brain turned on

[hrj]

I've been muttering to myself for the last year that I wanted to get back to writing fiction regularly (and also to playing music regularly) but my environment has been too disordered to make it feasible. Then I learned that there's going to be another Sword and Sorceress anthology and I turned on my backbrain to start stirring up possible continuing "skin singer" plots. Well, something must be working, because my brain has been feeling very creative ... on an entirely different set of set-aside stories that wouldn't really work for S&S. Yes, cat-vacuuming strikes again! But, hey: at least the juices are flowing again.

(The stories that have taken over my brain come from a thread I think of jokingly as "the Mabinogi for lesbians" or "why yes, I've read entirely too much medieval Welsh literature lately, why do you ask?" A fun little romance number using themes and motifs from MW lit., although trying to avoid the archaic language trap. I actually sold the first story in the set to Jinx Beers for Lesbian Short Fiction ... right before it folded. By that time I had a second story halfway written but got stuck on a plot twist and set it aside.)

I'd love to do something for the skin-singers series that's a bit more on the comic side, but I'm not sure I can write comic. And, of course, there's no guarantee that anything I submit will get bought ....

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Are they accepting slush? Or is this another "by invitation only"?

Based on the announcment on the web site (http://mzbworks.home.att.net/s22.htm) it looks like it's an open casting call. The one caveat is that it's no longer a DAW publication but a small press one, so there's no telling what sort of long-term legs it's going to have. I've only heard about it by the rumor mill -- if they're doing any direct contact of previous contributors, it hasn't gone out yet. And according to the announcement EW is editing it, so it's quite possible that the selected material will have a different flavor than previous volumes. (There were basically two volumes based on material that MZB had pre-selected before her death, and then one volume that was invitation-only edited by DP -- presumably because she simply didn't have time to sift through slush. And since the invitations were to previous contributors, it maintained a similar flavor. So this will be the first real post-MZB S&S.)

[mamaalanna.livejournal.com]

Thanks much! Working on it this evening.