No news to report lately. Couple of rejections this week, but that’s about it. I promise a meatier post next time!

Gah! HUB turned down “The Eighteenth Floor”, but only just barely. I made it into the second round of reading, and their exact consensus was “suitable for publication, but not suitable for HUB”.

So close, and yet so far. Still, part of the response gave me a sufficient ego boost: “It certainly deserves an audience.”

I’m starting to think I was British in another life. These folks really seem to like me.

We’ll see how the tale does over on Ideomancer.

I’ve been watching way too much “Deadliest Catch” lately, and the comparisons between fishing and marketing fiction have become far too obvious. At this point, in true Northwestern fashion, all my pots are in the water, or rather will be by the end of the day, once I put “Spired” back in the wild.

Yes, it got rejected again, this time by Not One of Us. It’s all good. I thought I had the market pegged, but it wasn’t quite what they needed. They had nothing bad to say about the quality of the tale itself, which is much better than the last response the story got: “It just didn’t grab me”.

Every time I get a response like that, my toes threaten to eviscerate the soles of my feet. It’s much easier to fight grammatical nitpicks than subjectivity, for which there is little to do but simply try to write more engaging tales.

Other than that, it’s been a quiet week. The sixth revision of “The Lifeboat” (and the second revision to that market), got mixed comments over on Baen’s. I need to rewrite it once more, but people will only read this thing so many times.

I finished up the first draft of my latest piece, a fantasy-humor yarn of about 4,000 words. I’m midway through the second draft.

Stay tuned.