Looks like my strategy of getting my short stories back into the market has already paid off. I sold The Budget Hath No Mercy to a new Canadian ezine, The Random Eye.
It’s not a big sale, but it is the first sale I’ve had since January. Amazing what getting my work into the market can accomplish. Heh.
This story was actually a project I undertook because I was unsatisfied with another story I wrote, At the Mercy of the Budget. I gave that one away to Planet Magazine back in 2002. That story covered much of the same ground, but really had no business being published. I wrote that version a very long time ago. The earlest record of submission for that one was in 2000, but I didn’t submit regularly in those days.
I recycled the idea in 2005, under 6 months after I finished Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp. I find file dates as early as November, 2005. The underlying idea changed little, but the story changed quite a bit. The execution improved a lot, too.
Understand that a writer in the stage I was in during June 2005 through about June 2007 advances very quickly. Every story I wrote was better than the last, and I learned something with each mistake. Once a writer reaches a certain level, you plateau. The advances in ability don’t come as fast, and they seem to come in quantum leaps followed by another plateau.
I’m sure some of that plateau effect is universal, but I may be more susceptable to it due to the incredible demands on my time from things not writing.
Selling a story this old is always pleasant. It makes you look back and see how far you’ve come. It’s scheduled to come out in January of 2009, so you’ll have to wait a while to see it. When it does finally appear, you can take a look back at the writer I once was. While I could write the same story today, it would be written differently.
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They just had a feature on the evening news about a supposedly indestructable phone. I think it was called the “G phone.” They tested it many ways and it lived up to it’s hype. It worked after 10 minutes underwater. The news crew did, however, find a way to destroy it. It took the Big Unit, Randy Johnson, hurling it at the sidewalk to kill this phone.
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Today’s backyard plant is …a mesquite tree! Woo hoo! It’s not a sage! This mesquite is the best trained and will be a wonderful shade tree in a few years.
If you like sages, don’t worry. I have several more on the other side of the yard. Now that we’ve crossed to the west side of the basketball court, you’ll get to see them soon.