I was fully prepared for a rejection, so I’m not upset about it. I learned from this, and I think it’ll make me a better writer in the end. Now, on to the next story!

When I sent the current story, I had no idea of the editor’s normal turnaround time, so I wasn’t getting my hopes up — many places take six to eight weeks or even more before they get around to reading your story. Today, the editor posted to his blog saying that when he rejects stories, he usually does so within five days of receipt, and anything that’s not immediately rejected like that is currently in his “Read Again” pile. So since I sent my story two weeks ago, I guess that means it’s at least made it beyond the immediate-rejection phase of the editing process. While I would be seriously surprised (stunned, shocked, bowled over, etc.) if my first story submission was accepted by the first market I sent it to, at least I have a glimmer of hope.

If I try, maybe I can get a second submission sent out before I get word on this one. I don’t yet have a big pile of polished stories to keep sending out like some writers do, but you’ve gotta start somewhere, right? And it’s really nice to know that, even if it doesn’t get accepted, my writing is at least worth a second look. I’m keeping my fingers crossed (which makes it hard to type).

The problem is that when my internet connection goes down, like it did today, I can’t access any of my work. There was a problem with our cable service for about three hours this afternoon, and I sat here stewing, thinking “What can I do to pass the time until it’s fixed? Oh, I know. I’ll do some writing!” And then I realized my fallacy.

There is evidence that Google is planning on making an offline version of Docs, but right now it looks like it requires running the code on a local webserver installation, which is not optimal. Come on! It’s almost entirely javascript already — why not make use of the nicely-polished, awesome offline storage solution dojo.storage? It uses one of any number of available offline storage providers (a fancy name for “things on your computer that let your browser save stuff to disk”) to allow you to store data locally, and lets you sync the local and remote copies when you do have internet access. There are already demos showing that it works safely. Google really needs to take advantage of this neat thing, to make Docs available even when my network connection isn’t.

I briefly pondered trying to integrate Greasemonkey and dojo.storage to forcibly add this feature to Docs, but then realized that first, it would take way too much effort to both decipher Google’s code and learn dojo.storage, and second, I don’t have the time for that sort of stuff.

One small difference in our reaction [to the 1989 San Francisco earthquake] was that Julie, near tears, sat staring at the set, wondering out loud if her husband was still alive, while I was rather horrified to discover that I was worried about how this would affect sales of the book. This made me feel just great about myself, as you can imagine.

I bought Tobias Buckell‘s book Crystal Rain recently. The cover depicts people in flying blimplike wooden ships, swashbuckling fearlessly. I haven’t read it yet, as I’ve been working my way through Dave Marusek’s “Getting to Know You” first, but in the meantime my brain has been pondering the whole flying-ships thing, and has invented the basic underpinnings of a watery world with steampunk flying ships. It’s the sort of thing where as I’m drifting off to sleep, I’ll think “Hey, that’s how the ships fly,” or I’ll wake up and think “Ooh, I know where they can get an energy-rich fuel source for their steam engines!”

So I’m a little upset that this world my brain is busy thinking up in the background is going to turn out to be way too similar to the Crystal Rain world, and I’ll feel like I’m just ripping Buckell off if I actually write anything in it. What do I do? Forge ahead and hope it turns out different enough? Give up on it until I’ve read Crystal Rain, hoping that his world will turn out to be significantly different and mine will still be usable?

And if I do read Crystal Rain, I’m afraid I’ll end up wanting desperately to appropriate Buckell’s cool ideas into my own, thereby turning my work, effectively, into unpublishable fanfiction. I don’t want that to happen, since I want what I write to at least be something that an editor would consider buying, and fanfiction definitely doesn’t fall into that category.

Maybe I’ll give up and write a vampire story set in the future on a jungle planet, or something.

The things I don’t schedule are the ones that sit around not getting done for weeks on end. I don’t vacuum carpets as often as I should, since I have no schedule for it. I get way behind on watching the TV shows I follow, since it’s tough to find the time.

These good habits have a net positive effect on my life, because when I do them (each individual time, and overall) I feel better about myself. I’m proud that I’ve been exercising regularly for a month and a half, and swimming fairly regularly for a couple years. I’m happy when I write, even if what I write isn’t something I’m terribly proud of.

But developing good habits (like exercising and writing) is really time-consuming. I already feel like my days are packed, and then fitting in an hour of working out or two hours of writing just makes me wonder what I’m going to have to give up to get it done. The weird thing is, it doesn’t seem like I am giving anything up, actually. Somehow, I manage to do these productive activities and still find the time I need to do my day job, read the blogs in my aggregator, and keep the house in a state of, uh, controlled chaos at least. So maybe good habits aren’t really as time-consuming as I think. Maybe their positive effect drives me to be more efficient in the other areas of my life, which almost means they’re actually creating more time for me.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel busy!