Dude, where's my free time?

When it comes to finding time to sit my butt down long enough to do some decent work in the writing department, 2008 hasn't been so hot thus far. Too many other things going on, most of them stupid little annoyances. Like my internet service--or frequent lack thereof. When my DSL connection hasn't been randomly cutting out, it's been achieving dial-up levels of slowness--despite multiple technician visits and insistences from customer service that everything's all fixed now. My work-from-home job requires me to download very large files that can take up to 30 minutes to download when my connection is working at normal speed, so this slow-to-nonexistent connection just ain't cutting it. Current ISP is being ditched for a new one that cannot be installed soon enough.

So anyway, I've squeezed in little bursts of writing or revision here and there, but that's just not a highly productive way to work. But in the non-writing parts of Writer Land, it's been a good week.

On Wednesday, I got an acceptance from the small press 'zine Kaleidotrope for a flash piece of mine called "Efficiency" (one of my few stories that doesn't really fall into the speculative fiction camp)

Locus reviewer Rich Horton has been doing some year-end summaries of various markets on his Livejournal which is worth checking out for a good overview of what some mags have published this past year. Yesterday I was happy to see that my story "To Worship Death" got a positive mention in his summary of Fictitious Force:

"Amid a selection of stories I really liked throughout (only one was marked 'So-So' in my notes) the others that stood out were 'Tangerine Bay' by David McGillveray and 'To Worship Death' by B. A. Barnett."

And yesterday Flash Fiction Online, a fairly new e-zine paying pro rates for flash fiction, decided that they're going to buy my flash story "Lucky Clover" for a St. Patrick's Day special. Woot! On an amusing note, this would be the flash story I referenced in my last entry--the one that got the "should be much shorter" comment from another market. Guess I won't have to start submitting it in haiku form after all.