Happy birthday, AmyLiz. Deb, I can't find the formatted version of that story,. with my address on it and stuff, and it seems that the contest people want a footer and page numbers too...scary how little I know about Word after all this time. It really is embarrassing...I'd get a book but I'd need something that breaks stuff down as simply as humanly possible.

Amy! BIRTHDAY!

Sail, wow. That one was kickass.

erika, I still suck at Word; I was a WordPerfect girl and I still find Word clunky, cumbersome and opaque. Do you need it formatted?

Thanks for the birthday wishes, all!

Yeah, let me check what they want again...I've got till July but I tend to talk myself out of these things if I don't pretend to do them impulsively...I wonder what I did with the nice one I had.(I have a real problem with seeing my work as having a future, though...in fact I'm fighting the urge to type work like "work" right now, and it's NFG.) This one is nice because you don't have to pay...if I have an urge to throw away $10, there are plenty of other places to do it than fricking Glimmer Train. Thanks. Good luck with the editor, Deb.

Ed Gein: Everyone: What should I put in my cover letter? If they like it, it would be my first published fiction. My non-fiction is kind of relevant to this piece, though(It's the haircut one from the contest I lost.) Yeah, it's Short Story Bagged Salad.

Kewl! erika, send me the version of it you want to submit, and we'll get it formatted to their specifications.

I appreciate their not wanting to lose the stories, but they don't understand what it's like to write like Rain Man does math(I'm kidding, I studied too, but when it comes to presentation, stone tablets all the way.) And I won't even go into my bizarre rituals.

This is annoyingly interesting. I'm working the Library of Congress cataloging system, flipping through various headings. I'm in the Authorship section, and there's a subdivision for special topics. ONe of those topics is "Housewives as authors." I think I understand the phenomenon they're discussing, but I'm not sure. Are they thinking that a housewife trying to fit in writing in her life is different from, say, an accountant trying to fit in writing? Or are they thinking that housewives write a particular type of book?

There's a category for women writers. There are also categories for insane authors, laboring class authors, and prisoners as authors.

Ha.

One of those topics is "Housewives as authors."

Probably looking for a place to file Jean Kerr, Erma Bombeck, Peg Bracken, and the like. People whose writings focused on the domestic.