I fully intended to finish up revisions on the short story I submitted at the end of August, but I decided to spend a couple of days getting caught up on my short story submissions. I’ve received a number of rejections lately and I had at least a half dozen stories lying fallow. Most of them I resubmitted without change, but one of them underwent a fairly substantial editing process this weekend. It was originally written for an MWA anthology that it didn’t make (at least in part because the concept of the anthology changed in midstream from a general “relationships” theme to a more specific husband v. wife theme), then it was rewritten for a Supernatural Lesbian sleuth anthology (I kid you not!). This weekend I went back to the original version but wove in some of the story changes that I developed for its second incarnation and then hit it with several grains of sandpaper. I like the new version a lot now.
E-subs make life easy, but there are a number of top-notch markets that don’t take them. Since I had to go to the post office anyway, I decided to make a sweep of some of these markets, so I sent stories to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Crimewave, Asimov’s and a literary journal in Canada. Lofty goals, but I’d love to crack one of those markets. In total, I think I sent six stories out between Saturday and Sunday. Maybe seven. I know there was at least one e-sub among them.
I also recorded “Harming Obsession” for Storytellers Unplugged in October. Some of us will post short stories instead of essays in honor of Halloween, and a few of us will also provide podcast versions of the story. At first I toyed with the idea of adding sound effects, but once I blocked it out I realized the effects would be concentrated mostly in one part of the story, so it didn’t seem like such a good idea after all.
I did get back to the story I originally planned to work on this morning. The editor suggested some fairly radical cuts. I’m okay with some of them, but others not so much, though I am trimming a little from the contentious areas and rewriting others to improve their necessity to the story.
Big Brother is getting down to the wire. I read a spoiler about who wins the POV contest, which suits me just fine. As I’ve said elsewhere, a Daniele/Dick finale would probably be boring because giving the money to one would be perceived as virtually identical as giving it to the other. If it ends up Dick/Zach, the debate could be more lively. Dick was in your face and Zach was under the radar, and it would be interesting to see which tactic would be rewarded. I think Daniele would beat Zach simply because she won more contests and was a more aggressive player without being overly contentious. Jameka would win no matter who she was up against, I think. We shall see.
I put the finishing touches to my review of James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown for Onyx Reviews and it’s now up. I like Burke’s books a lot, but, as I say in the review, he’s starting to lean on some crutches in his writing that I wish he could shake off.
