It's been a surprisingly good few weeks for short fiction sales, especially given that I haven't had a whole load of time to send stuff out lately, what with all the work on Prince Thief and Endangered Weapon and, oh, that day job thing I try not to think about.
First up recently came Pseudopod, taking my short story Prisoner of Peace - also recently accepted for Eric Guignard's very-likely-to-be-wonderful After Death anthology - and, due to some scheduling mix-ups and my usual confusion, leading to me tying myself in knots over whether a story that had been accepted but not printed could actually be called a reprint. Fortunately it can, since After Death comes out in March / April time and Pseudopod are planning to run Prisoner on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, for reasons that I can't explain without giving the whole thing away.*
Then, soon after, Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews expressed interest in my Leiber-pastichingly-titled tale Ill-Met At Midnight**, with some reservations ... he wasn't entirely sold on the ending and asked me to make a few changes. I duly went back to it, while sitting in the roof garden of our hotel in Marrakesh on a sunny December afternoon - one of the most pleasant bits of writing I've ever done. And it did the trick!
Clearly, there's a moral here. I now know where I've been going wrong all these years, and it has everything to do with not writing everything in beautifully sunny North African locations. Expect this to be redressed the very moment I make enough money to emigrate...
* In fact, come to think of it, running it on the anniversary of Nagasaki already gives the game away a bit. But it's also very appropriate, so I think it's probably okay.
** Which I recently read aloud at Fantasycon 2012, if you happen to be one of the nine people who was there.
First up recently came Pseudopod, taking my short story Prisoner of Peace - also recently accepted for Eric Guignard's very-likely-to-be-wonderful After Death anthology - and, due to some scheduling mix-ups and my usual confusion, leading to me tying myself in knots over whether a story that had been accepted but not printed could actually be called a reprint. Fortunately it can, since After Death comes out in March / April time and Pseudopod are planning to run Prisoner on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, for reasons that I can't explain without giving the whole thing away.*
Then, soon after, Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott Andrews expressed interest in my Leiber-pastichingly-titled tale Ill-Met At Midnight**, with some reservations ... he wasn't entirely sold on the ending and asked me to make a few changes. I duly went back to it, while sitting in the roof garden of our hotel in Marrakesh on a sunny December afternoon - one of the most pleasant bits of writing I've ever done. And it did the trick!
Clearly, there's a moral here. I now know where I've been going wrong all these years, and it has everything to do with not writing everything in beautifully sunny North African locations. Expect this to be redressed the very moment I make enough money to emigrate...
* In fact, come to think of it, running it on the anniversary of Nagasaki already gives the game away a bit. But it's also very appropriate, so I think it's probably okay.
** Which I recently read aloud at Fantasycon 2012, if you happen to be one of the nine people who was there.
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