Okay. So far this week I’ve made progress. Just sat down and wrote the weekly flash fiction for Monday (easy, because I took the picture and already had the story in my head!) Also did about a page on “The Wrong Side of the Tracks,” a story that’s due Sept. 30. So far I have about 1500+ words and I only need 1000 at least. (It’s actually a follow-up to one of the Monday Flash stories. Never waste good background.) Typed and edited my QSF blog post for next month (yaaaay!) and I want to get busy on something I’m submitting to a YA podcast after the first of the year.

But I gotta be out of my mind: I’ve started another short-short sci-fi story I’m calling “Glimpses of the Moon,” which is also due at the end of September! (If I can’t place it I have another market for it anyway!) And I’m resuming work on a Christmas story I started last December (December is not the time to submit Christmas stories, September is!) for a Holiday anthology I just found out about which is also due in a few weeks. About 4000 plus words I think. I’m calling it “And Ma in Her Kerchief and I in My Cap.” I may well wind up with an entire collection of stories with titles from that poem, having done “The Moon on the Breast of the New-Fallen Snow.” and “Not a Creature Was Stirring,” neither of them placed yet.

And I actually have about four stories out there, including the recently-submitted “After School,” which may take about 3 years to get accepted/rejected from the anthology. And I have at least three acceptances for physical, real-world print anthologies, one of which may be out in a month or so, the others I haven’t heard from yet. But, considering I already have been published three times in 2017, I’m not going to complain!

———-Jeff Baker, August 29, 2017