Swim on over to welltoldtales.com, the excellent pulp fiction podcast, and have a listen to “Eee”, which was originally published on Afterburn SF back in ‘07.

Despite focusing almost all my energy on “The Tyrant Stratagem”, it’s nice to be able to get the occasional short fiction piece out there in the wild. And “Eee” has found a fine second home in editor Kevin Colligan’s podcast. Special thanks also go to the reader, Eleiece Krawiec.

Stay tuned.

Just a heads-up that life has been interfering lately, as it often does, and I’ve been so busy with the novel and my short fiction that I haven’t had the chance to get here and update this blog as much as I’d like. But I will post a more thorough update soon.

Stay tuned.

One of the biggest pains in my writing life is submitting fiction. For those of you that might be new to writing, I highly recommend the use of a spreadsheet to track your submissions. A simple excel sheet makes like much easier in this regard.

In my case, the sheet has all the necessary fields I’ve come to rely on when submitting work:

• Story Name
• Count — word count
• Incept Date — the date I first considered the tale “finished” and ready for submission
• Current Status (Rights Sold) — with a drop-down menu for draft (1st through 3rd, not counting requested rewrites), Pending Acceptance / Awating Rewrite, and my personal favorite — Accepted! Note the exclamation point, friendly editors…
• Submitted To:
• Date Submitted:
• Check Back: — an important field. Basically, I take “date submitted”, add the magazine’s estimated response time, and add or subtract any “modifiers” in time, such as the extra month I typically give a mag on top of what they request. Some magazines don’t like modifiers — I think it was Strange Horizons that simply says “We really mean, this isn’t an estimate” when it comes to their reply times. Other magazines — like Clarkesworld — get an estimate, but they rock so hard I never have to worry about following up before they send on their decision.
• # Rejected: — I find on average my tales get rejected about six to ten times before someone takes it. It’s been as low as two hops in one case, but as high as sixteen in another.
• Rejected By: — Here I list magazines that have seen the piece, whether they’ve bought it or otherwise, so I’ll know not to pester them with it again.

That’s really all there is to it. I’ve other useful worksheets in the spreadsheet, such as “Retired Stories” and “Sales Records” (which helps me track rights sold), but this is all basic, simple, and a must if you’re tracking say, fifteen active tales like I am at the moment.

Of course, as an editor you could always make my workload easier. I’ve many decent pieces of fiction. Won’t you consider buying some?

Stay tuned.

If you’ve followed this blog, you might wonder why I’ve been so quiet lately. The short answer is, I’ve been busy.

Interested in the long answer? It’s been a busy several months in my personal and professional life. We’ve cut back on staff where I work, which is symptomatic of the economy, and I’ve become the sole member of what once was a two-person team, and I’ve been merged with another group, taking on several old and new responsibilities there. I’ve been rabidly undergoing a series of home labs and study projects while I pick up much greater proficiency in T-SQL, which is a back-end language utilized by Microsoft’s line of database products. I’m learning quickly, but it’s the result of hard work and aggressive projects at my job. This is fine, of course, but there goes more time.

Back in February, I also had elective surgery to resolve a lovely spinal condition that had been plaguing me for the better part of a year. I’m still not fully healed-up.

To top it off, there’s still the mundane stuff, like submitting fiction (still chasing my first pro sale — hoping for this year) and the non-mundane stuff, like the novel I’ve been writing.

The piece is called The Tyrant Stratagem. It is the first in a three-part series. I have outlined everything that happens in all three novels in a ginormous outline. Character development is the core emphasis of this work, and what happens at the end is so specific and deliberate that I simply wanted to give this tale, this new universe, the best treatment I can. I’m about twenty-five thousand words into it. It’s a blend of dark character drama, thriller, and military action. I know that, no matter what, I will have bagged at least my twelfth fiction sale by the time I start agent-shopping with this work. I’ve other finished novels to my name, but this will be the first I’ll really start shop around.

So I’m busy. I’m still going to be updating here now and then, but I can’t promise you’ll hear from me more than once a month. It’s a short-term sacrifice to sink more time into the single work that deserves everything I can put into it. I believe in this piece. I think it could be the start of something big. Now I need only complete it and find an agent that believes in it as well.

Thanks for reading, everyone out there.

So the first sale of the year is in — “Eee”, as originally seen in the september 2007 issue of Afterburn SF, has been picked up by welltoldtales.com. This is one of the darkest science fiction pieces I ever wrote, as well as one of the most “out-there” examples of my train of thought.

True story: the idea for this piece came from a discussion thread over on EscapePod.org’s discussion boards. The topic was six-word stories. Here’s the idea I posted that I decided to expand upon:

“Cybernetic dolphin. New Kingdom of EEEEEEE.”

I can’t wait to see the guys at Well Told Tales give this one the proper treatment.