Thanks everyone!

Erika, agreed. How did you finally do your bio? (yes, I'm still freaking out. And I can't think because I'm in pollen jail.

I fricking hate bio statements. But it kind of depends on the piece and the kind of magazine it's in. Like when I wrote one for Hayden for High Hat, I was a wiseass and wrote that I only write things for him till I can get in at HBO. because High Hat is a very irreverent mag and half the other contributors wrote that they shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die, and stuff like that.(I always put an e-mail address in, even though, as far as I know, in ten years only one person has contacted me directly about something I've written.) For the last one, it was fairly serious, and mostly listed stuff I've written about and mags I've been in. I put The Chair in, as briefly as possible. I thought it was pretty good till the magazine came out and almost every other writer in that issue had a blurb from their novel to list. I guess I could have put in that Hec thinks I'm as twisted and funny as a monkey in a crackhouse, cause really? That's as close as I've come to a review so far.ETA: I suppose all I can say is that I feel your pain...the bio statement makes me conscious of all the ways my real life isn't cool, and yet? I sort of resent those writers who go Full Metal Asshole on the subject and write that they were raised by haiku-writing wolves, because maybe I just want to pay you a compliment, dickweed. Not really have a meditation on how artificial the biographical statement is, and "Don't you hate these things?"(And yet, I do. But sometimes I think our generation will die of irony poisoning.)

Hahaha. And me over here trying to drink a glass of water like a lady.

Thanks. Maybe if you have an interesting and brief thought about how the story came about or a reason you feel connected to the material(say you're retelling a family legend, or it's in a garden and your mother taught you to garden.) Of course that you're married and a mom(Not in that Laura Schlesinger way...poor fucked-up Deryk.)

Sounds like a plan, Sox. Right now, I'm having a "Write what you know," type discussion with an editor I know. I sent him a story, which he likes, but he also thinks with a few tweaks I can take the disability stuff out of it and publish it in some ritzy journal or something and have some agent begging for my attention.(Dude, have you ever met an agent?) Also, I don't really think that you can stand a crip character on her feet and get an able-bodied character. I mean, I could give her a phobia, or OCD, or something like that. Something that doesn't show as much. Or I could make her a loyal caretaker, and that's why she's been held back from the fun the other girls had. Limitation is kind of what this story is about. Also, though I can write about able-bodied characters(and do...I live in an able-bodied world, after all,) I wonder when I would be passing, trying to do that all the time. I have already written more sex scenes than I've been a party in, and the older I get, the less comfortable that becomes.(Not that I'm asking anyone here to help me get my count up.)

Wait. Why do you need to "take the disability stuff out"? That smells Rotten and stupid, especially if you wrote it to be from a particular perspective. I call bias shenanigans.

Um, maybe in this case, it's more like a self-loathing thing(although he's blind, so it's not quite the same thing) and a certain feeling about what markets will take. And I have noticed that recently, my most successful submission was about an able-bodied person. But the other attempts at the same magazine were two and three years ago, and were pieces of a longer work. Maybe that was obvious, and maybe I've improved technically or something.

Yay, Sox on the sale!

And yay, Amy on the signing! (And totally sorry I missed you today!)

As for me...

Tonight, STARS won 1st place in YA Fiction- English language at the International Latino Book Awards!

SO MUCH YAY in this thread!