And today I sold a short story. My SF short-short Singularity will be published in a British magazine some time in the future. I found out about the sale this morning, and by lunchtime I had signed the contract.
This is another hit in a string of good turns that happened to me in the last 72 hours – so I think it is just fair mentioning that this morning I also got a rejection slip: sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

The story is a short humorous piece, a club story about The East Wexford Knitting Society that I mentioned last May – as I mentioned in the old post, I expanded it a little for submission, but it’s still under 2000 words.

So to celebrate I took the day off – and I only wrote 500 words on my current novel (title still pending), and then sat down to read The Courage to Be Disliked, a philosophy book by Japanese authors Ichiro Kishimo and Fumitake Koga.

I am not normally much into self-help books (but then again, I’ve been known to read anything, even the back of cornflakes packs) but I had read a lot of reviews of this one, and I had picked up an ebook copy for little more than a buck a few weeks back. Also, the title suggested it could be something I might like reading.

The interesting thing is, the book is built as a dialogue – which makes for easy going – and is about Adlerian psychology as philosophy. A subject I knew nothing about, but that is providing much food for thought – not so much in the helping myself department, as in terms of story ideas and world-building options.

And a good non-fiction book is always a good way to cleanse the synapses after a long bout of writing/editing/worrying-about-stuff.