A couple of bits of good news to enliven what so far has been a slow and somewhat agonising month on the writing front:
First up, I'm pleased to announce that Encounters magazine, from recent upstart press Black Matrix Publishing, will be including my story Some Theories Regarding the Current Crisis. Some Theories is a short science-fiction tale, which I wrote a couple of years back for an anthology that (so far as I know) never saw the light of the day. Since I'm still catching up with myself on the editing and sending stuff out front, that makes it one of the most recent of my stories to appear. That period of the end of 2007, beginning of 2008 was when it first started to really feel like I was finding my feet, so it's great to see this stuff beginning to get out into the world.
In other, really belated news, I mentioned a while back that my poem Doppelganger - as published in Chiaroscuro webzine - received an honourable mention for anthologist-extraordinaire Ellen Datlow's annual horror best-of anthology in 2008. What totally passed me by was that my story Rindelstein's Monsters (from the Comet Press Death Panel antho) got a nod too, for the 2009 edition. Pretty neat that, and I fully intend to actually get into one of this things, by 2027 at the absolute latest.
Finally, if anyone's been paying attention they might have noticed that my novel wordometer doohickey has been mutating. The good news is, I've finally broken my 100'000 word target; the bad news - you guessed it - is that there's still a ways to go. Funland is raging out of control, and the focus now is on finishing it before it tries to take over the world or eat my brains. I'm hopeful for getting it knocked on the head by close of play on Wednesday. Frankly, if it isn't done by the end of the week then I might just stop. Endings are overrated, right?
