Sale and proation

Asimov's wants "Prayers for an Egg". This story was work-shopped in Villa Diodati, where the magnificent writers there said something along the lines of "more alien, less patchwork". The aliened-up version seemed to be to Asimov's liking.

The world needed a story about tentacles, tri-gendered aliens and their ambivalent relationship towards their own eggs. I've only written two stories with tentacles in them, but both have been accepted by pro mags. I think I'm onto something here. What's with editors and tentacles, anyway? Because yeah, I find them cool, but then I wouldn't put them in my stories otherwise. It just seems peculiar that, for once, the universe and I are on the same tree. I'm tempted to graft tentacles onto my trunk stories, see if they get sapped up... That's a fun writing exercise if I ever heard of one.

This is my third pro sale, so I guess I'm on proation, that ample space-time continuum wherein writers reside who have sold three or more stories to pro markets but who haven't yet achieved the level of excellence and consistency of say, Nancy Fulda, Jay Lake, Ruth Nestvold etc. For me the consistency thing is a big issue, I can sort of get things sort of right like 10% of the time but 90% of my writing is wasted on unfixable drafts. If anyone has suggestions to help with this, I'm all ears.

Now, should I join SFWA or not? The fact that I can doesn't mean I have to, but there might be cool stuff in that organization that I'm missing. So far, I've only seen the icky stuff.

Sorry if this blog post doesn't make any sense: I'm kind of giddy. I may have to go eat some chocolate.

Edited to add: Thanks to Marshall Payne who helped me with an early version of this story. I don't know how I forgot to mention him by name. This story has gone through a lot of fazes and there's probably other people who have critiqued it and who I've forgotten to mention in this post. Among them are several Hatrackers and several Liberty Hallers. Thanks to all of them. I doubt there has been a story that's been more critiqued and edited than this one has.