Late At Night Is Not a Good Time To Come Up With a Post

It's a little late in the game to knock out a post for The Last Draft, but I hate to miss. If you don't want to read it because it's not inspired, just skip it this time. The sad thing is that I also forgot we have a writing meeting tomorrow until Laura mentioned it in passing. But since I'm not up for a submission this time around, I guess it doesn't matter too much. I've spent the evening studying magazine markets (instead of studying Physics, which is what I should have been doing). There just aren't enough hours in the day sometimes. *Sigh*

I haven't given up on pictures books. I just want to work on some other projects for a break. It's been awhile since I wrote anything for magazines, but I thought it might be fun to throw some short stories out there since they're...well...short. I'm finding their rhythm more like skits. Short and sweet with a good punch line. Picture books are more like concentrated orange juice. You have to cook them down, down, down until they're as strong as they can possibly be. Switching to novels has been hard because they just seem so long and wordy. (That's only when I'm writing them. I find reading them just fine.) But I'm working on my scene cards (thank you James Scott Bell) for one of those too.

I sent out Melba Sue and the Cactus Kid to an agent this time around. All this market research is very informative but extremely time consuming. I despise the thought of ignorantly adding to anyone's slush pile, so there's nothing for it but to do it anyway, even though it's chopping up my writing time. Ho hum. It's late, and just because I can't stand the thought of not submitting to the rest of you, I'm going to send you my rewrite for "Sweet Revenge." Happy reading if you get a chance to get to it before the meeting.

P.S. Do you think it would have been better to use chocolate pudding instead of jell-o?