Goethe Mining Complex

My Internet connection was down all morning due to a "neighborhood outage," according to Cox Cable. It wasn't a big deal since I needed to get this article out the door to the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society. This is the article that goes with the maps I've been making of the Mercurian mine setting for my novel. I'm actually quite pleased with how it turned out. I wrote 5100 words just today, and ended up having to edit it down to 5000, since that's the limit stated in the writers' guidelines for the magazine. In truth, I probably didn't have to bother, since my 5000 words and the magazine's 5000 words won't be the same thing. Still, with an e-zone, it's usually pretty close to what Word comes up with. All in all, a very productive day. I'll probably spend all of tomorrow doing research for my Ph.D. comps, assuming I have Internet access then.

JTAS has updated their guidelines to say that they now have an eight-week turnaround time instead of a two-week time. That's seems a little more realistic to me anyway. I still haven't heard from them about my first article, but it's only been two weeks, so that's not really surprising. If they reject the article (and I don't really think they will -- it's very typical of the material they publish), I've got a couple of other markets in mind that might be interested in it with just a little modification. Certainly writing the Goethe Mining Complex article has done so much for the plotting of my novel that it was time well-spent even if I don't make a dime off of it (but of course I hope I will). I've done my first and second editing passes and just printed out a copy for the third and hopefully final pass (yeah, right), but I need to set it aside for a couple of hours so that I can get a fresh look at it. After that, I'll make what changes need to be made, email the submission to the editor (Lord Almightly, thank you for the gift of online submission), and head up north to teach my astronomy lab tonight.

Yep, all in all, a darn good day.