Zombies on the Internet!

Well, I finished the edit on the Zombie story last night around one in the morning and crawled into bed to sleep like the dead (I know, bad pun) until around 7:30 this morning. After a few minutes of looking around Duotrope, I found a market. So, long story short, I've sent the zombie story out to get its first round of rejections before aiming my crosshairs a little lower and shooting for small game.

I should mention that I've got another story out and about, waiting on the rejection slip from that one to come over the internet postal service that is Gmail. This one is a cheap King Arthur piece that my mother loves, so I feel an obligation to try and sell it if at all possible. I wrote it for a class a while back, and did a few rewrites over the past couple months. It got sent off to garner a rejection from Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show in November, so we're still playing the waiting game. Of course, their standard response time is 90 or so days, so I've still got a month or so before I can print out the rejection, put it in a pile with the others, and start shopping that story around again.

This weekend I plan on sitting down to work on the ghost story. Hopefully everything will go according to plan, and I'll actually get some work done on it, at least enough to have a few pages typed up so I can gear up to really start working. At the same time I'm going to try and go for something that isn't spec. fict. for once. There's been a story rambling around in the back of my head about that ever popular topic, fathers and sons. I'm going to work on that on the days I get blocked on the ghost story.

On a slightly more personal note, our cat is now "the fearless hunter". We have a few mice in our apartment, not due to slovenly housekeeping because Desi is a fanatic about that sort of thing. No, our mice are the result of living in an old building in an older neighborhood, in the apartment that was occupied by a bachelor bartender for 7 years before we moved in and took a solid week to clean before we dared to bring anything inside. These mice apparently have a nest right outside our bedroom window, which has an old AC unit in it that Desi refuses to let me take out. She won't let me take it out of the window because I would have to put it in the bedroom closet, and she insists (I swear I'm not making this up) that doing so would take away all the space she needs for her shoes.

The result of this is that the mice are entering through a small gap between the window and the AC unit, where they artfully ignore the traps I have set along the wall on that side of the bedroom. The cat goes wild and wants in the room, and he has now taken out 3 of the rodents. The extremely expensive, rodent-like animal that my fiancee purchased now lives in mortal fear of the cat, staring out from the bars of his cage and begging us to protect him. The cat is amazingly proud of himself. I feel like an idiot for spending 15 dollars on mousetraps.

Well, that's all for now. I'll post a little on Friday or Saturday, whichever day I start on the ghost story.

Take'er Easy,

J.C. Tabler