This and That

First of all, I've just turned in Honor's Paradox, nine months early. There's no telling how long it will take the editor to get back to me, probably with revision requests, or if this will push up its publication date. Usually that's about a year after submission. Meanwhile my agent is asking for the proposal for the next one. I've got to do some hard thinking there as it involves Jame, Tori, and Kindrie, the Riverland and the Southern Wastes, the past and the present. Among other things, I'd like this one to be a sort of parallel for Tori of God Stalk, partly told from his POV as a boy in the past, partly from Jame's as she rediscovers it in the present. Tricky. Do any models come to mind?

Then too, the 1st edition God Stalk sold on eBay for $127.50, which is comparable to the price some book stores are asking for it. I don't know who ended up with it. I probably will set up a sales page on my website, prices to be determined in part by the going rate.

Yesterday I went out to the stable to find that Pip was gone. Marc had given him to another farm down the road. I hope he'll do well there. After that Countess galloped all over the field before allowing herself to be caught. Then Dandy reared on Liz and fell over backward on top of her. We were afraid that her leg was broken, but it only turned out to be mightily bruised.

And the NPR 3 minute fiction contest ended. I have no idea yet who won. My entry is below. About half the details in it are true.

The House Next Door

Some people swore that the house was haunted. They said so even before old Mrs. Fflewellyn died. Mrs. F used dim bulbs to save electricity and always turned the lights off behind her so that her nightly wanderings glimmered from window to window. Sometimes she could be seen, a squat, back lit figure peering out with clouded eyes. She never left home, however, and no one visited her. Meanwhile, the old house slowly collapsed around her with trees poking up through the eves and the rear rooms tilting on fallen pilings.
James and Georgina Tomlin, her neighbors, hated it. Their own little house was immaculate. Their narrow garden, however, languished in the shade of its hulking neighbor, out of whose shadows weeds crept.
"If only Mrs. F would die," they said to each other, "we could tear her house down and expand our garden."
But years passed and Mrs. F lived on, a bobbing light, a dumpy form dimly seen at a window. Groceries were left on the front steps. When a week's worth piled up, someone finally went in to look.
The Tomlins bought the house and prepared to tear it down.
"I want to go in first to see it," said Georgina. In all the time that they had lived next to each other, they had never exchanged visits. So in she went late one autumn afternoon.
James stayed outside to manicure the lawn.
Dusk fell and Georgina hadn't emerged. It must be very dark inside, James thought. Maybe she had fallen through the floor.
He took a flashlight and climbed in a downstairs window that boys had broken. Mrs. F's son had cleaned out everything of worth, which was to say virtually nothing. Here was her kitchen with dirty dishes still in the sink: there, a small side room bulging with garbage. Here, her living room with wooden chairs standing disconsolately around where the table had been; there, an empty bird cage with fresh seed and water in its dishes.
James climbed the tilting stairs, trying not to touch the water-stained wall paper.
On the landing was an overstuffed chair with an antique box camera resting on it.
A bathroom opened off the landing, its floor aslant, a full set of dentures beside the stained sink.
The upstairs rooms were dimly lit by tall, old-fashioned windows. One contained a disordered bed with a frumpy, soiled nightgown sprawling across it. Another was full of small unopened boxes showing handkerchiefs, ties, and underwear through yellowed cellophane. A third was awash in photographs. James stood on the threshold staring down at a sea of faces. Many were old family pictures(why had the son abandoned them?) but most were recent, taken at an angle as if from above, all of him and Georgina in their dining room. One snapshoot, larger than the rest, showed Georgina head on with dingy, oddly familiar wall paper behind her. She looked very surprised.
"Georgie?" he called. No answer.
Back on the landing, James picked up the camera. There was no film in it. The chair's seat was molded to the form of Mrs. F's plump bottom and strands of gray hair clung to the greasy headrest. The landing window looked down through his own bay window as if onto a lit stage.
Someone sat at his dining room table, a dim, dumpy, back lit figure with wild gray hair. It looked up at him through clouded eyes and smiled toothlessly.
James' legs gave out. He sank down on the chair, which received him like a mother.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.