m. c. de marco

I was interviewed virtually by Lila Munro at Realmantic Moments yesterday. I apologize for the late notice; I thought the interview was coming out today. It includes an excerpt from my Paramourtal story, “Sympathy From the Devil.” Three or four other interviews with authors from the anthology are available under Lila’s Musings.

My characters were interviewed meta-virtually by Sherry Gloag at The Heart of Romance blog last week while I was busy packing. I apologize for the even later notice; I thought the interviews were coming out next month, but that turns out to be when the reviews will appear.

As part of being back on the wagon, I wrote a new story this week and submitted it to Writers of the Future—-at 11:50pm Thursday night, thanks to their new online submissions policy. Today I finally got around to logging it and my NaNoWriMo novel in my giant writing spreadsheet, and I noticed that I’d gone over the million word mark back on November 30th. Since I started writing in the summer of 2001, I also managed to do the whole thing in just under 10 years.

I found my way from Dean Wesley Smith’s twitter feed to L. M. May’s posts on learned helplessness and Barry Eisler going indie. I read Barry Eisler’s long two part dialogue with Joe Konrath about self-publishing.

School’s out, probably for summer, and I’ve been inspired to blog again by the recent flurry of posts on self-publishing. But when I logged in after all these months since NaNoWriMo, Drupal distracted me from my intended topic by telling me I’ve been a member of my website for over six years.

I hesitate to call it a novel, but I have limped over the finish line with about 50,100 words. In NaNoWriMo terms I think I blew a knee this time. I did not hit my all-time high daily word count (8,000 or so, I think) but I did do a couple of days of 6,666 words at the last minute. Maybe next year I’ll pace myself better.

A few sites now have reviews of Paramourtal up. The Paranormal Romance Guild gives my story (“Sympathy From the Devil”) 5 stars and calls it a “[f]un tale with a funny ending.” Clara Hanoux summarizes it as “cute” and says, “This might just be the best story of the anthology!”

In preparation for the upcoming month of procrastination and cat-vacuuming, I skimmed through my favorite NaNoWriMo forum last night, NaNo Technology, and found the usual topics—including how to make a map for your fantasy novel on your Mac.