Eric James Stone

Last Tuesday, I started taking an online class on writing for television. It’s taught by Larry Brody, who has created, written, or produced for such shows as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Fall Guy, Walker: Texas Ranger, Automan, and many others. Brody is also the author of Television Writing from the Inside Out : Your Channel to Success.

As part of the class, I’m working on the developing the TV series for which I have already written the teleplay for the pilot episode. Naturally, I will end up revising it a lot.

Anyway, after last week’s lesson, I’ve revised the “logline” for the series. (A logline is a one or two sentence premise for a show.) Here it is:

Camelot High is a one-hour fantasy action drama about a high school freshman whose life becomes complicated when the ghost of King Arthur recruits him to fight magical evil.

The assignment due today was to write a 3-page “leavebehind” — a series proposal. It took longer than I thought to write it, because even though I’ve put quite a bit of thought into developing the series premise, organizing it into a coherent 3-page presentation was tough. Plus, I had to think up loglines for four episodes in addition to the pilot.

My usual rejection time from the slush reader at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is 8 days, and today made 8 days since I submitted the Lincoln story. So I was a little surprised not to spot a SASE in my mailbox when I got my mail tonight.

But then as I sorted through my letters, I found a SASE hiding behind another envelope. So I was no longer surprised.

But then I opened the SASE, and I was surprised to see Analog letterhead. My fastest response from Analog in the past was 39 days, and “Upgrade” (nee “The Nuclear Option”) had only been out 26.

Here’s what Stan Schmidt, the editor, had to say:

UPGRADE may well work as a PZ [Probability Zero] when a slot opens up, but I don’t have an opening right now. If you don’t mind, I’ll hold onto the MS and ask you to let me know if you sell it elsewhere before I find a slot.

So, it’s not quite an acceptance, but it’s not a rejection. I am, of course, pleased as punch, because I love Probability Zero. (PZ is their label for gag-based short-short stories.) I can remember when I first read about PZ in The Early Asimov over 20 years ago, so one of my goals has been to write a PZ story.

Fantasy author and all-around nice guy Brandon Sanderson is one of the nominees for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. This is mostly on the strength of his debut novel, Elantris.

I interviewed Brandon a few months ago.

Crossposted at the Bloggernacle Times.

Today I gained another year for my age. It didn’t happen all at once — it’s been accumulating for a while now.

My loss has also been accumulating (deccumulating?) for a while, though not as long. Earlier this year, I set a goal of getting my weight down under 200 pounds by my birthday.

According to my scale this morning, I weigh 199 pounds. That’s a loss of 30 pounds since the beginning of the year.

How did I do it? For the most part, it was through eating less and exercising more.

I cut back on eating out for dinner. Instead, I mostly ate Michelina’s Lean frozen entrees (sometimes with a can of tuna added) or Lean Pockets.

I went from two Sausage Egg McMuffins for breakfast down to one. (I’m not kidding.) Or else a Clif Bar energy bar.

Usually no lunch or just a light snack.

I bought a treadmill two Christmases ago, but didn’t really start using it until this year. I put it in front of the TV. It’s amazing how quickly 40+ minutes of walking goes when watching a TV show.

And then there’s one other thing that I’m not sure whether it had an effect or not. I have asthma, and I’ve been taking an amino acid (NAC) that’s supposed to break up mucous in the lungs. But NAC is also being tested for stopping nicotine and cocaine cravings, so maybe it lessens food cravings, too? If so, then NAC made it easier to stick to my diet. (FYI, I have never craved nicotine or cocaine, so I don’t know whether it works on that.)

Apparently, the new version of Wordpress was, for some reason, classifying everyone’s comments as spam without even putting them in the moderation queue, so I wasn’t being notified of them. And since spam comments older than 15 days were deleted automatically, probably some legitimate comments were lost.

Why didn’t anyone tell me that their comments were never showing up and I was never responding to them? I just thought nobody was bothering to comment.

The Codex Writers forum just finished the Codexian Idol contest. What was the Codexian Idol contest, you ask?

In the first round, all the contestants anonymously submitted the first 500 words of a story. The voters then voted on the stories, and the top eight moved on to the second round. After a few days for the authors to add 500-1000 words, the stories were uploaded and voted on. The top four stories moved on to the final round. The authors then finished the stories and uploaded them.

To my great surprise, after the first round my story “A Lincoln in Time” was in first place. At the end of the second round, my story just barely managed to hold the lead, with only 1 point separating it from the second-place story. In the final round, my story ended up taking second place, behind a clearly superior story by James Maxey. I doubt any major market will buy my story (the time-travel/presidential-assassination ground having been well-covered by many authors), while I think it likely James will sell his very quickly.

In any case, I’m very pleased to have placed in a Codex contest for the third time.

The latest issue of Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show is out. It includes my story “Salt of Judas,” with a great illustration by Deena Warner.

The cover story is by my fellow Writers of the Future Volume XX author Brad Beaulieu. Another story (not online yet, but still part of the issue) is by Scott Danielson, a new author I met at LTUE a couple of weeks ago. (Both of them are members of the Codex forum with me.)

There are also stories by new authors (I believe) Ty Franck and William Saxton, plus more established authors such as Al Sarrantonio, David Farland, and Orson Scott Card himself.

The audio story is one of my favorite OSC stories, “Middle Woman,” and it’s read by another Codexian, Mary Robinette Kowal.