Everything I need to be doing writing-wise. Consider this a public peek in my writing notebook:

1. Submit queries for sections from MAPS that standalone. "Onto the Ice" to a fiction market; "Living at the Company" to an essay market (need to change the title to incorporate St Exupery); "The Good Pilot" to a fiction market; "The Map of My Dead Pilots" to an essay market (it's the title story); "Getting Lost" to an essay market (change title on that one also); "Looking For Ben Eielson" to an essay market; "One Hundred Crash Stories" to a fiction market. "We Flew Dead People" is already out (4 weeks ago).

2. I have quite few queries to write!

3. Continue with Florida short story project. I never intended for this to become an actual project - I wrote "What We Left Behind in Jacksonville" just because it was a story I knew could be written. I didn't plan to write more than one story set in Florida. But when I was finished I had other ideas and in one way or another all of them were related to FL. "The Dead Girl on Tropical Trail" came from an initial Ray Bradbury writing idea - making a list of topics that interest you and seeing if a pattern emerged. Here's the list thus far:

Marineland, The Air Boat, The Day They Tore Down the River House, Zora Neale Hurston Lived Here, The Day the Whale Died on Canova Beach, The Surfers & the Shark, The Neighborhood That Was Never Built (folks who read Paper Towns will know what I mean - as will anyone who lived in FL), The Purleau & The Cemetery, The Drive-In, The Old Movie Theater, The Parking Lot Carnival, The Bats over the House, Houser's Grove & Zoo, The Football Game, Behind the Scenes at Disney, The Lake at Wickham Park (Don't Touch the Bottom), The Train Tracks, The Boxes of Bones at the Museum/Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Stacks at the Old Eau Gallie Library, The Dragon

4. One story I wanted to write was about my father's involvement (as a teenage boy scout) in tracking down the missing coffins from Precious Blood Cemetery after the RI flood in 1955. I kept getting stuck though because I don't know his hometown well enough to write about it. But then I realized that the only reason I know this story is because my aunts told us after my father died - when they were in FL for his funeral. (We were all looking at old pictures and the flood came up.) So really, this is a FL story also and thinking about it that way gave me an approach to it, while still keeping it in RI.

5. That makes a lot more sense in my head then it does right here.

6. An essay for the western book. But I already know what that one is about and I'm already working on it, so really I only mention it here so I include it in the big picture. (It's the damn Chris McCandless bus.) (I promise there is more to it than that though.)

7. Querying on that essay (once it's written) wouldn't be a bad idea as it should standalone just fine.

8. The point - in all this - is keep writing. There are dull parent-type appointments today and tomorrow but Wednesday will be back to queries and getting them all out in the next week. (I lost time on that with the traveling and company.)