Last night around ten PM I finished the beta-ready draft of what I am currently calling MY SHINING LIGHT.  It's a 48k novella, or very short novel, or, relative to what I usually write, a short story.  It was supposed to be a submission to Ellora's Cave by April 1.  It's going to be my virgin run on Lulu.  I can't really describe it much, because it's still too close, but genre-wise I can tell you that it's fantasy, maybe urban fantasy but I think that's a more specific genre and I don't meet it.  It is, very definitely, male/male erotica in places, though I think overall the story is more "romance."  There is gender bending in this story, and a great deal of shapeshifting.  I'd intended it originally to be a light romp, but as I delved further and further into it, it became less rompy and more . . . well, Heidi, I guess, whatever that means.  I sent it out to five betas last night, and told them they had until mid-June, so to take their time.  In the meantime I will continue to wrestle with cover design, something which I am learning is possibly worth going through traditional publishing alone.  But last night, I hit "send," wooted on my facebook status, then went to watch Roseanne with Dan.  

In the middle of the night, I woke with a raging case of strep throat.

I've had strep quite a few times in the past two years, an interesting fact because I haven't had tonsils since the seventies.  That said, I've now had it with enough regularity and extremity that I know it upon arrival, and I do not fuck with it.  I'm on high pain killers at the moment, and I have a doctor's appointment at 1:30, by which time I won't be surprised if I don't have a fever of 103 and can barely stand.  It also aggravates the fuck out of my hypermobility, and adding to this the fact that I am approaching my monthly waltz with my uterus, I would probably feel a lot better if a truck just hit me.  But all this is nothing new, just aggravating.  What has my attention is the mental track that ran behind the sore throat when I woke in the middle of the night.

What do you think you're doing? You're going to publish THAT?!  THAT, with all that sex in it?  With all that BOY/BOY sex in it?  And you're going to put YOUR NAME on it?   You're going to TELL PEOPLE?  How can you do this?  HOW CAN YOU DO THIS?

I don't know where it came from, except that it was my head, and it wasn't a dream or some psychic messenger.  It was just me.  Not the part of me, obviously, that wrote the story, or read it and thought it was pretty good--not, obviously, the part that read it and thought, "Yes, actually, I like that message, and it's good, and I want this to have my name on it."  But that voice, wherever it came from, was real, and loud, and it was very, very panicked.  And it doesn't surprise me at all that it rode in on the wave of a raging sore throat.

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