Year: 2006

For Want Of A Better Word, Let’s Call It Progress

After a record-breaking 146 days, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show‘s first reader has passed ‘Queen of Diamonds’ on to the editor. His reading of the story and decision to buy or reject will take only 30-45 more days, their email promises. Which means that there’s a real chance they’ll keep their rejection (or, Editor […]

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Me Silly Sod!

How embarassing! Due to a editing error on my part, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine has rejected ‘Oenocide’. The editing error (consisting of a failure to edit at all) resulted from ‘Oenocide’ originally being targeted for Gastronomicon II. For GII, each story would have appeared alongside a recipe. Hence, for GII, having a recipe as the […]

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Follow The Trail

Confirmation received: “Oenocide” has entered the unparallelled slush administration system at Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine! Follow the story’s progress through their slush pile at their tracking page; “Oenocide” is #6996… 

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Rejection Collection

With his usual lightning return time (this time, 13 days from mailing the manuscript to receiving the reply), John J. Adams has notified me by form letter that ‘Diamond sharks’ is not what he wants for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Damn! Asimov’s gets it next… 

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Prisoner of War Released

While response time to actual manuscript submissions is similar in duration to the gestation of elephants, it seems that response time to queries is like the lifetime of the mayfly. An associate editor at Dark Wisdom wrote: Sounds interesting, please feel free to send it along and thanks for asking. So of course, the first […]

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More Submissive Behavior

Yesterday, I re-read ‘Prisoner of war’, the story I wrote for Cat Sparks‘ Agog! Ripping Reads anthology, and discovered to my delight that it’s actually a hell of a lot better than I thought when I finished it. (My girlfriend, though admittedly not the harshest of critiquers, is even asking for a novelization.) So today […]

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Murder Your Darlings

Thank God there’s a precedent for this, be it a twenty year old precedent. In 1986, at age sixteen, in the middle of the night, I wrote a creepy science fiction story entitled ‘Illusion’ (this was so long ago I wrote it in longhand and typed it out the next day on an old-fashioned IBM). […]

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Submissive Behavior

With ‘Diamond Sharks’ on its slow way across the globe to Gordon Van Gelder’s desk, there are now an unprecedented total of three stories in various stages of submission around the world: ‘Queen of Diamonds’ has been lurking at the Intergalactic Medicine Show (Orson Scott Card’s online mag) for almost four months now; almost time […]

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Diamond Sharks!

The deed is done. And now to find a market… Diamond Sharks SF short. My Writers of the Future 2005 workshop story. Rewritten and ready for submission! (Actually, I know I’m going to send it to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction first, if only because Gordon Van Gelder is so incredibly quick to […]

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SASE Epiphany

Alternative titles for this post were ‘Long live the Internet’ or ‘How stupid can you get’. As a Dutch author writing for the American (and English, Australian and other English-language) market, I’m SASEically challenged. Most markets, especially the professional ones, only accept hardcopy manuscript submission, and require that a self-adressed stamped envelope (SASE) is included […]

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