12:05 AM, Friday morning -- and the skies are a deep clear black.
Like slowly swallowing a spoonful of ice cream, Autumn glided in two days ago: a bright and cool feeling. I’m savoring it -- and contemplating the mini-manifesto thrust upon me by circumstance.
No more will I submit work first to markets who pay on publication. If I sell to payment on publication markets they will only hold my writing for a year. After that it will be contract re-negotiation time...or time to withdraw my work.
I have just tallied up the amount of time and money I have lost to markets that buy my work, promise to pay me when they publish, hold the stories for years, and then go out of business without printing a word.
It’s so much better to think about the weather...
All these endlessly deep skies. The crisp slanting daylight and the cool wide nights. It’s raining now. Soft, barely there at all -- just the ground growing damp in shadowed time-lapse. Alanis Morissette’s "Uninvited" is playing on the stereo. At this moment I would like a glass of ruby-red wine, something velvety and decadent.
Better yet, I’d like to taste the same on someone’s lips.
Time to sleep now, I think. Or else these Autumnal thoughts will hold me awake for hours...
--- JWR, 9/25/98
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