Hi folks, I hope your week is starting out well. You know, I believe weekends are too short. We really need three days to accomplish anything and do it at a reasonable rate where we get some rest. But alas, this is the way life is.

The wedding Saturday went well, by the way. It was a pretty typical wedding. It's amazing - we used to go to them all the time but this was our first one in 6 years. I guess our family and friends all finally settled down. I used to be an old pro at wedding stuff but not anymore. Oh well.

You'll notice I posted a new picture. I decided that while I was all gussied up, it was time to take a more recent picture for here and the Authonomy website. I hate pictures of myself but it's a necessary evil every now and then, so I anted up. Maybe I'll be able to use it for my legion of fans with my next publishing contract that I just know is around the corner. Legion, yea right. But I'll keep working getting published again. Anyway, moving on ...

I hoped to finish reading "The Lighthouse" over the weekend, but I didn't. I read a good bit Saturday after the wedding, but yesterday flew by (as Sundays usually do), so I was only able to read one chapter before I went to bed. After church I got groceries and realized that I also needed to tidy up the house and do laundry. I wasn't expecting that and it took longer than I expected. I'm so close to finishing it. Maybe today during my lunch break.

So Thanksgiving is just around the corner and then the holiday shopping season. I really need to get up on things. They're having a big Holiday Craft Show here on Friday. I always take that day off and Mom and I go. I hope I can get some Christmas shopping started there. I've been out shopping a couple of times but no luck so far. Maybe my luck will improve Friday.

I decided to hold off on querying my longer pieces until the start of the new year. I know how I feel about work that comes in between Thanksgiving and New Years Day - I want it off my desk ASAP. I know it's wrong to assume that everybody is like this, but I work in an office and see the motivation and diligence sliding off this time of year. I hate for my writing to get that kind of treatment and I have been burned by this in the past.

I strongly suspected that was happening when I was doing non-fiction work a few years ago. There were some instances with E-mail submissions where they rejected my work within 2 minutes of receiving the query. I knew they didn't even read it. At least with fiction they seem to be more polite and will wait long enough to make it look like they read it before shooting out a rejection. Most people probably don't realize this, but editors/publishers are pretty brutal with non-fiction work. Some of my harshest, meanest rejections have come from (of all places) Christian publishers!

This is no joke: One time an ordained pastor told me that my work wasn't publishable and I would need extensive help to make it that way. I told him I was glad my book publisher didn't agree with him (it was right after I published "Battleground Earth"). The piece I submitted to him was published by another magazine a year later and was so well received that they asked me for more work. While I am a Christian myself, I will openly admit that there are some people out there that let power go to their head. They have the attitude that wearing the mantle of faith gives them the right to chuck manners and civility out the window. They give us all a bad name and sadly, they're usually the loud ones spewing judgemental nonsense that we can't seem to shut up.

Anyway, I switched to fiction almost three years ago and I know I'm in a different (and ironically, more civilized) game now. I guess I need to heal those scars. But for now, I still have some queries/submissions/contest entries outstanding and I've decided to give them until the end of the year to respond before I launch a new round of queries with the beginning of 2010.

In the meantime, I'll keep doing what I want, when I want. I've decided that I'm not going to stress out over how I spend my free time anymore. I expect way too much out of myself and I need to slow down and smell the roses, so to speak. Hobbies are supposed to be fun, but somewhere over the summer I got so focused on accomplishing more with them that I lost that sense of joy. I think that's been a lot of my problem lately. I've been bogging myself down with things I shouldn't even worry about. So I've decided that every day, I'm going to try to find one thing to do that makes me happy. Today, I hope to finish that book during lunch, and maybe take a walk outside during my afternoon break when it warms up. Today is supposed to be the warmest (nicest) day all week, and I want to enjoy it some, even if it's only 15 minutes.

Ok, that's all for today. I hope you have a good Monday and I'll see you later.

Bye!