Spring in my Step

After the rush and satisfaction of making a deadline, I'm full of beans and in the mood for finishing and sending stuff, so I looked over all my WIPs on the way to the Arvo Job today and discovered that a couple of my almost-there stories are a lot less rough around the edges than I remembered. My SF werewolf story, for example, only needs a couple of paragraphs in the first half to finish it. I’ve been editing it on and off over the past few months, and lost track of the fact that it's pretty much ready to go. I’ll send it out into the world to howl for its supper this weekend. Then I’ll tackle the harpy story, and try to get her off and flapping by the end of the month.

This means I’ll have a vamp story, a harpy story, a werewolf story, and a tale with dragons out doing the rounds, along with 4 SF stories and 2 other fantasy stories. Given that I used to only write dark, serious, dystopian SF, this is a strange situation to find myself in (though the last two do contain SFish elements i.e. spaceships and “robots”) Still, it's good to try new styles and subjects. It keeps the writing fresh and fun.

And on the subject of dragons, Happy Spring Festival. I’m particularly fond of the Year of the Black Water Dragon for two reasons. Firstly, I get to post a picture of a dragon. Secondly, it represents a certain liberation for me. You see, after a lifetime of snickering and bad jokes because I was born in the year of one of the less charismatic animals in the Chinese horoscope's 12-year cycle, a few years ago I discovered that the day of my emergence in the particular year of my birth actually makes me, you guessed it, a black water dragon, albeit one born in the year of the truly blah, aforementioned unmentioned animal. Yay! I mean, black water dragon sounds so much more impressive than the other critter (which I'm blotting from my mind)

Given that the best thing about superstitions and horoscopes is that you get to pick and choose which bits you like and want to believe, I'm going with this legendary classification rather than the mundane other one.