Jeff Macfee

Things are looking up over here.

I have some family additions on the way, and they appear happy and healthy.

I sold a non-fiction piece, which in the grand pantheon of writerly achievement may be small, but for me looms quite large.

I have a professional change coming up that I’m hugely excited about, and I think will shine some happiness into all corners of my life.

Just thought I would acknowledge all of the above. You never know when everything will go to crap, and I want to have this moment to savor.

I think so.

No I have not sold a story. Different life area entirely. But still exciting.

I have a spreadsheet I use to track the status of all my submissions. To date it’s been easy to fill out the columns, because they’re always the same columns. Date Submitted, Story/Piece Title, Submitted to, Response. And Response is always the same.

Until this last week. Response=Accept. Wohoo!

And I got to fill out a new column–Money.

Well everyone else does it (said with whine…)

* Revise The Final Tasting
* Revise Faster
* Finish 1st draft of Nine Tenths
* At long last go back to the bazillionth draft of Moneymaker.

Really it’s the last one I’m dying to do. After not touching Moneymaker for almost a year I’m ready to start fixing it. I think I’ve absorbed what I wanted from VP, in relation to this story. Rejected some bits too. Got a strong enough vision to maybe make it worth something, send out a few queries. Still–going to make myself finish all the other work first.

A third iPhone? Really?

I am a bit of a Mac tool, and I’ve completely eradicated Windows from my house. I’m still proud of that, and I miss it not at all. I’ve had markedly fewer crashes on my last two Mac laptops than any PC that preceded them.

But.

But my iPhone, which I love to use, goes belly-up entirely too often. I owned a 3G less than a month before it tanked. I took it to the unfortunately named Genius Bar and it was kindly replaced, so I thought little of it. But now, four months later, I’ve had to replace it again, and this time not for free. I’m not playing handball with the thing–for crying out loud my last pre-iPhone phone went through the wash and still worked. What gives?

I’m not defecting, not yet. When it works, the iPhone apps and flexibility and near-perfect user interface are still for me. But I’m watching the market (yes, this means you Android). Might be I’ll have to give up one kind of snobbery and replace it with another. Steve Jobs may not have a death grip on me after all.