So, What Am I Working on Right Now?

I've got a lot of projects on various burners.

The first one is that I am trying to get into the Viable Paradise writers' workshop, which will be held this fall. The story which will serve as my application piece is the "Deal with the Devil" story that I've wanted to write since I saw Burgess Meredith in "Printer's Devil" on Twilight Zone (btw, for Zone fans, CBS has a site with complete episodes, unfortunately incomplete) when I was eight years old. Since the story was written as a present for someone, I am not going to reveal much about it until they get to see it on Sunday, but kitten says that it very well could be the best thing I've ever put on paper. We'll see if John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear agree with me. After Sunday, I'll tell you the concept for the story.

In the endless search for cash flow, I've been investigating venue after venue, looking for anyone who pays. I've got The Closing-Time Girl in at The Writers of the Future Contest as well as Deer Hunting with the Prey in the slush pile at Collective Fallout. I should know about those sometime in the next couple of months. I did, however, find some folks who pay the outrageous sum of $400 for a 3000-word or less feature story.

Penthouse Variations (scroll down to the bottom of the page for guidelines)

No shit. A couple people that I respect that have written for Penthouse and when I read the sex scenes in my stories aloud at appearances, the young ladies wiggle on their seats, so I'm going to go for it. I've got one story currently sent to my line-editors for markup. A collaborator and I are going to begin working on a co-written one in the next week or so. I might object to being a whore, but I am less worried about being a high-priced call girl.

On the other end of the scale, my granddaughter Lily is starting the third week of a "being good" period at school. Each time that she does this, she gets another Violet story. This one is going to be called Violet and the Prince's Ball. No snide comments about cross-posting it to Penthouse with a few additional scenes, either, you bastards with the dirty minds.

After all of those, I've still got a flashback chapter from the novel involving Red Molly, Vincent, and Coyote to be written--that'll be coming up soon. Even though the novel as a whole is not moving at all (I need to figure out a way to make it interesting to people who haven't read any of my other Iona material. Aieeeee.) some of the parts of it are still firmly set in my mind.

Finally, I've got a Valentine's Day deadline for an Iona story for Marcey. I wanted to write a beautiful, but tragic Diamond story, but that is dead in the water. I had a thought this morning about garden gnomes, moles, and my grandmother. I wonder if this is a message from God?