Sunday Progress Update

Last week, the Sunday update didn't happen until Wednesday, and this week it's Tuesday. Progress!


Reading
I finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, finished Small Favor, got partway into Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and then my iPod suffered some kind of failure. I don't know if it will be possible to resurrect it and, if it isn't, the future is likely to hold a narrower, and yet more varied, set of audiobooks, since I'll be limited to what I have an Audible and can thus put on my phone.
Since it already was on my phone, I just re-listened to Men At Arms, by Terry Pratchett. I'm not an across-the-board Pratchett enthusiast, but I really like the Watch books. As a late...it's complicated of mine once said, "I'll take Drunks Trying to Make a Difference for $200".
Anyway, I finished that about an hour ago, and now I'm re-listening to An Artificial Night, by Seanan McGuire, because it too was on my phone already, so it was that or Dead Beat. An Artificial Night is honestly one of my favorite books, and is the holder of three of the dubious Evan Reads a Lot And Has Opinions Awards, specifically for "Only print fiction I've found genuinely scary", "Only 'creepy little kid' horror I've found genuinely scary", and "Only work in any genre to make me sort of give a fuck about Tam Lin". Mostly because the part it borrows from is the part where Tam Lin gets turned into all the different things, and Janet has to keep hold of him. And like, that's where the good metaphor is. That's the part that has anything to do with anything. Tam Lin did a stupid, or possibly just had a poorly timed moment of bad luck, when he was younger, and the process of moving past that requires that Janet be patient and be willing to get hurt a little bit while he goes through a process of messy, repeated transformation that's probably even harder on him than it is on her. (In real life, of course, you don't have to be willing to deal with that, but it's often going to be the price of staying with someone while they try to get over whatever issues they have, and it is sometimes worth it. But this is a writing blog).
I also started reading On Writing, by Stephen King, largely to find out whether some of the more annoying attitudes about craft and process that people take away from it are actually present in the text. So far, 23 pages in (to the 2002 mass-market paperback edition, if it matters), he's only said three things about writing at all. Listen to your editor (agree, although with more caveats than he puts on it), the machinery to be a writer is inborn, but not especially rare (agree), and television is bad, or at least bad for writers (strenuously disagree, although this might have been a somewhat more reasonable position to take when one's exposure to television started in 1958. Narrative fiction in all media, but especially television, has improved immensely in the intervening 6 decades).


Writing
Absolutely nothing except this blog and a couple of long Facebook and Tumblr posts. Not even pointless assignments for my Other Job, because summer term is over and fall hasn't started yet. Not counting the social media activity, however articulate and well-researched it might have been, I spent 2 hours and 10 minutes writing last week. Eventually there will be a progress tracking widget somewhere on this blog to show how far I've gotten on the 20,000 Hours project. I'd like to finish in less than 20 years, so hopefully I'll find a way to pick up the pace.


Publishing
We've got an unprecedented number of submissions right now, and needless to say, I'm behind on reading the ones that it's my job to read. I used to read all of them, a whole year ago when we opened the magazine, but that just isn't practical anymore. This is requiring us to do some rethinking about how to best implement the part where, while obviously we don't want to publish bad fiction, we want even less to not publish good fiction. Every piece we get deserves appropriate and charitable reading, but what that looks like can vary wildly from story to story, and there are hard deadlines and limited person-hours. It's a hard problem and we're working on it. Believe me, if we come up with an amazing solution, you'll hear about it.