Jules Jones

I've been busy this weekend. The story at Musa isn't offically reverted until the 28th, but I sent it off to an editor friend on Friday night, followed by the reversion letter once I had my mitts on it on Saturday morning. Since it's a reprint this will probably come to naught, but I'm not going to have the time or energy to do anything about self-publishing it for some months, and it may come in useful if she needs a short at short notice.

I then spent some considerable time wrestling with Word 2013, which is the iteration installed on my new computer. It isn't much like Word 2010, which is the version I occasionally reluctantly prodded with a stick on the old machine, and is utterly unlike the Word 2003 I am obliged to use at work, let alone my dearly beloved Lotus Word Pro. I think I could eventually get used to it, but it was a somewhat traumatic experience getting the other two items for submission into a modern file format. Auto-format did some decidedly odd things to the novella file I'd exported from Word Pro to Word 2003 file format. Importing the individual chapter files in .txt format for the novel submission went moderately smoothly once I'd worked out what the file import command was called and where to find it in the shiny new (to me) ribbon.

The novella was the new thing I've been whining about for the last month. It did eventually creep to the 20k mark, but I've still sent it to the market I was eying when I thought it was going to be 17k. Contemporary m/m erotic romance, and oh so hurt/comfort.

The novel... The novel last went out on submission as treeware to a couple of mainstream SF houses. The novel also got an agent's attention prior to that. The agent said he couldn't sell it, but he wanted to see the next thing I wrote. The next thing I wrote was a romance novel. And the next one after that. And... you can see where this is going. The novel has romantic elements, but it is not a romance. Then I got the extended bout of medical issues and stopped writing at all for some years. And in the meantime more small presses have come along, and one of them looks like it might be a good fit. So that went off as well today.

And now I should get back to the novel I was 30k into when I felt the urge to fiddle with the novelette and turn it into a novella...

Just sent off a short story submission to an erotic romance anthology. This is one I've had for a while but never found a home for -- too short to publish as a standalone ebook, not really enough sex for erotica markets, and never hit the theme of erotic romance anthologies I'd seen. But there are a couple of calls open now or coming up that it might suit, so trying my luck with the first one...

I spent a large chunk of yesterday afternoon editing the rough draft of the urban confessions story down from 6100 to 5000 words, and sent it off to Predatrix last night for comments. She seems to think it works, so after another quick typo hunt, I spent a large chunk of this afternoon formatting it according to the editor's guidelines -- which include the requirement to provide a short blurb.

I hate writing blurbs. I believe I have mentioned this before.

Also, I only use MSWord at home when I have no other choice, and while I use it at work, we're still on 2003 at work and I have the ribbon-infested 2007 at home, which results in much swearing every time I have to use the wretched thing and can't find where they've put assorted standard functions. However, the file is on its way to the editor's inbox. If she doesn't like it, I shall probably add some material and self-publish it at Smashwords, at which point I may have to consider setting up a new pseudonym.

It was fun writing fluffy porn, but it was rather noticeable that I had to make a determined effort to stop it from picking up more plot than fluffy porn needs. I could probably get a rather longer story out of it without much effort. Nevertheless, I would like to point out to my usual editor that I can so write a short story that *stays* a short story. :^) Even if not very often...

Mirror of http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/240466.html, where it has received comments.

Had an email to say that my short story A Sparrow Flies Through has been accepted for Maxim Jakubowski's Mammoth Book of Erotic Quickies. :-)

Had an email a couple of weeks ago, which I only saw last night courtesy of an email whoopsie... Fortunately I managed to get the electronic file to him just in time, so it's still in the anthology.

Seriously chuffed about this, because I have enormous respect for Maxim Jakubowski, and have long had an ambition to get onto the ToC for one of his anthologies.

Received an email late last night to say that Musa's Erato imprint has accepted "And if I offered thee a bargain". :-) With the inevitable editorial caveats, of course... That could be fun, as I don't disagree with the reason for the editing request, but will need to be careful that the necessary fiddling won't throw off other aspects of the story.

Reprint of a 5.5 kword short story, as far as I know to be published as a standalone. No idea at this stage when it'll be released

This time a joint effort with predatrix. Trouser Trap is exactly 5 kwords and m/m, which fits a call for submissions for a series of mini-anthology ebooks, so we hauled it out this afternoon and prodded it a bit. My esteemed co-author wrote a blurb for it, and I've just done the cover letter and sent it on its way.

It's slapstick sex comedy. I'm not sure if that's *quite* what Ye Editor is looking for this time round, but she bought the last thing we sent her, so she must have some appreciation of our sense of humour. :-)

Just sent off "And if I offered thee a bargain". This could prove interesting. I've submitted it specifically as speculative fiction, but given that most of my credits are in erotic romance, the ending could come as a nasty shock to anyone who assumes that this one is as well.

So I sent Journey Into Freedom to Tor on Monday. I know it's got at least as far as the Flatiron building, because I paid the extra 45c for delivery confirmation, well worth it for the peace of mind it gives. :-) We now hurry up and wait. And wait. And wait... I should probably decide on the next venue and do the query letter, since it seems to be easier to tackle that bit when the thing's actually sitting in a slushpile somewhere, rather than when I'm trying to wind myself up to send it out again.

I finally gave in and bought a scanner. I've never had one at home, because they do take up a lot of room and I didn't really have enough use for one to justify the space, when I can usually hand whatever-it-is to Other Half with instructions to scan it at work. But there's starting to be enough call for it now that it's inconvenient to not have one in the home office. I did a little research on the one I had in mind, and discovered that nobody cares about the OCR side of things any more. Since one of the major uses I have in mind for it is OCR, this was a bit of a pain. At least I eventually managed to find out that it does have OCR software included. Things have obviously changed since the last time I had occasion to read scanner reviews... It does have a nice easy button on the front to scan and send straight to the printer, pity this invariably results in the printer spitting out a blank page. I'll have to get this sorted out, because one of the secondary reasons for getting the scanner was increasing need of photocopying.

The Syndicate 1 peaked at #8 on Fictionwise's erotica list this week, although it's dropped back down to 11 today. It's also picked up a couple of reader ratings.