My latest tale was just wrapped up. To summarize the final version:

That was nuts. Don’t let anyone ever tell you I don’t work hard to reach that magic number. And 4000 does indeed seem to be a magic number when it comes to story length. Quite a few great markets cut off subs of higher word counts. Just an FYI, in case you hadn’t noticed that little caveat.

You know, Duotrope is a useful utility, but it seems like some of the markets out there register oddly in the search criteria. I keep finding all these other markets — some fairly prominent — are mis-categorized.

A classic example came up today: Chizine. Heard of it a while back, but had no idea it was still out there. Running a search on Duotrope for “Horror” publications, it doesn’t even seem listed, unless you scroll down to “Secondary Matches”.

I’d consider Chizine straight horror, or at least accepting horror, so I don’t know why it’d be called a “secondary match”. Wierd. It appears I’ll now be relying more on Ralan’s in concert with Duotrope.

By the way, my hats off to Graham Fielding and Michael Anthony, both regular visitors here, both whom have had fiction picked up very recently. Michael has work inbound for Pseudopod, and Graham snagged a slot on the Barren Worlds Anthology.

Several rejections. That’s all. Ugh.

I also had to withdraw another story from a market that either has a response time approaching nine months, or has gone dead to the world while leaving their website up. I don’t know — could be a spam filter thing on either side. Weird.

I won’t mention who they are here, because knowing my luck, said party will come back with vitriol about how they were still sitting on my sub. Which begs the question: Why the heck didn’t you respond to my two prior queries, sent months apart?

More than likely, the magazine either only responds to acceptances, which is a practice that needs to die in this industry, or said market ghosted and left their website active without so much as a “stop submitting” heads-up.

Either way — marked as dead, moving on, slightly annoyed.

I highly encourage you to consider purchasing a copy of Matt Wallace’s first short-story collection, hopefully the first of many, titled “The Next Fix”.

If you’re not familiar with Matt, let me give you a brief summary: he’s one of the nicest, most welcoming people you’ll meet in this industry, no matter what side of the page you’re part of. Matt was one of the first to serialize fiction in the podcast format, but his accomplishments range across a host of print, e-zine, and other formats.

All that wouldn’t really matter if Matt’s fiction were escalated into notoriety by some kind of inner circle, a phenomenon I’ve seen before. Let me dispel any illusions you might have: Matt is the real thing. He is one hell of a writer, gifted with a sharp, fluid style that lends itself to rich worlds, characters, and plots. While Matt’s favorite realm seems to be the urban distopia, many of his stories stray far from that mold.

I highly encourage you to pre-order this publication from Apex Book Company. By doing so, you’ll be in for a tome full of twelve razor-sharp stories spanning a host of unconventional, often terrifying plot lines. It’s a good dose of fiction for a horror or dark science fiction fan.