We had a good evening, the dog and I. We didn’t go for another walk as we played ball instead in the garden. For hours. He got lots of sticky buds in his long, dangly ears, but thoroughly enjoyed being brushed to get them out. His humans checked in, from Spain, to see if he was all right and seemed happy enough when I sent pictures via the poet so he could post them on WhatsApp. I don’t have WhatsApp but the MMS wouldn’t work.
At ten past three in the morning, the dog woke up barking. It had started to pour with rain the night before and I’d left the window open so I could listen to it. Sometimes, at around 2am – 3am, I’ve heard strange noises too, as though the dustmen are early. I had a look out of the window, but it was someone in a white van driving off. All the outside lights were on across the road. I think the van was coming out of a garage.
I let him out in the garden for a quick run (him, not me!) and we went back to bed. Then he woke me up at 7am to go out again. We got up, had breakfast, fed the birds, played ball for a bit, and then went for a walk. I was stricter with him this time. Every time he pulled, I just stood still until he stopped pulling. By the time we got back, I’d even had him sitting to wait to cross a road.
Once at my desk, the first thing I did (again) was finish and publish yesterday’s post. I added my LinkedIn back to my Jetpack social settings, and it seems to have posted without counting it, like it did before. I’d like to post to BlueSky too, but the option still isn’t there.
Last week, Scruffy Magpie didn’t show up in our garden for two days, and after the sparrowhawk got one of the pigeons, I hoped it hadn’t got him too. But he turned up again, with the others, on Saturday. I watched him for a bit yesterday and it does look as though he has new feathers growing through over his damaged wing. He’s also flying longer distances, albeit close to the ground still. And he’s looking much cleaner.
Fingers crossed he’s on the mend.
(I’m making a gender assumption because I can’t tell the difference between a male and a female magpie and, to me, most animals and birds are ‘he’.)
The dog finally settled down on his blanket on my reading chair in the office, so I shut us both in and watched Week 3 of my applied depth workshop. Which reminded me…
There’s a Kickstarter happening right now (it might be finishing today – the day this posts), that I’m toying with. It’s the PULPHOUSE FICTION MAGAZINE subscription drive that gives all backers a 6-month subscription to this now-monthly fiction mag. All backers also get to submit a story a month for up to 5 months, I think, when it’s usually a closed market. (They pay 6c a word.)
I usually just subscribe to the magazine. We get 5 or 6 brand-new anthologies thrown in too. But this time I’m toying with buying one of the live workshops: how to turn short stories into novels. This live 3-week workshop runs only twice, once in July and once in August. I can’t do the July one, but I can do the August one. So I’m toying with the idea.
By the time this posts, I will have already made up my mind, and may yet still only go for the 6-month subscription and bonus books. But at the time of writing, they had only one stretch goal left to hit.
***Soapbox alert***
One of our weekly magazines launched its Halloween short story contest yesterday too. They’re paying £500 for the winning entry and £200 for the runners up, and the winners will be published in the magazine. But just by ENTERING the contest, not even winning it, the small print says that ‘by entering this competition…[the writer] grant[s] to the publisher…all rights to the story…on an exclusive and perpetual basis…’
That means they don’t have to pay for any other use, FOR EVER. BUT YOU CAN’T USE IT EVER AGAIN.
Nah. Next!
Yes, for the same story, PULPHOUSE would pay only $72, if they even considered 1,200-word stories, but they pay every time they use it (if it’s lucky enough to be selected for an anthology too), and the rights stay with the creator to do with whatever s/he wishes once PULPHOUSE has printed it first. Other UK markets would pay between £80 and £130 for 1,200 words, but the rights stay with the creator there too.
Both of these latter instances mean the writer can reproduce the story as many time as s/he wants. It can appear, for a further fee, in other magazines that publish reprints, on websites that publish reprints, in anthologies that publish reprints. It can be self-published in multiple collections. And the creator gets to keep all other rights too – that’s translation, television, radio, play, computer games, PLR, ALCS. For ever.
And it can be sold to a higher payer for the first publication that uses it as well.
If you think your story is worth £500 FOR EVER, or £200 FOR EVER, or even NOTHING, if it doesn’t get placed, FOR EVER, then more power to your elbow. Not me, cock. That’s how I managed to self-publish almost 50 short stories in 12 months. They were all still mine.
***end of soapbox alert***
The dog was pestering me to let him out, but the rain was banging down outside and he’d already shown how much he doesn’t really like the rain. I took him to the door anyway, and before he realised it was raining, he did his mad dog thing, circled a few times, barked, did a couple of laps around the garden, came in and then stood there looking at it and then at me, as if *I* was the one who’d gone mad.
He finally settled down without being told and went to sleep while I revised FIREWORKS AT KILLIECRANKIE. I had to lose around 300 words to get it down to 750 and it took 2 passes. It’s a bit disjointed and not as ‘depthy’ as I wanted it to be, but hey, 750 words? And it meant I actually had a finished story one day ahead of deadline for 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS. Yay!
Of course, last month I had to have it finished before we went to Poland. (Is it really already a month since we went to Poland?!) (Checks calendar – yes it is!) I’ll give it a quick proofread today, for typos, and get it posted. But yay!
I finished today’s blog post and scheduled it to publish, then took the dog, the client edit and the novella workbook into the living room again. Yesterday was better than the day before. Today needs to be even more betterer.
Busy! The dog is good to alert you when something is going on, even if it’s not major.
It’s so important to read rights contracts.
It is! I’m amazed by how many don’t, and then are surprised by what they’re giving away. Or even paying for someone else to take, effectively.