acceptance

The Ins And Outs Of Selling English-Language Stories

This is something I’ve wanted to blog about for years. High time I got around to it. How do you know your story is ready to go out? Where do you find the publications that might buy it? What are all the things you need to think about before submitting? And many other details… The […]

Read More

Daily mashup

Eleventh story sold! Got the wonderful news today that Daily Science Fiction, a professional webzine that sends speculative fiction stories to its subscribers every single day, is snatching up my story Mashup for publication. If you subscribe to DSF now, the story will drop into your Inbox somewhere over the coming months–and in the meantime, many […]

Read More

Death and the Maiden

In which writing pays for reading… Another sale! Hard on the heels of Prisoner of War, which sold two days earlier, I got the wonderful, happy-dance-worthy news that Friendly Fire would be bought by the Machine of Death editors. The maiden, in this case, is Linda, and the death is predicted by the eponymous Machine of […]

Read More

Heinlein Rules

Sale! A hugely disloyal member of the marvellous online writers group Codex, when I was still fairly active there I participated in the 2005 Halloween contest. The contest challenge that year was to write a Halloween story based on a ‘seed’, something to prod the muse, provided by another participant. Seeds could be anything from […]

Read More

Hello Back, Don

Sold! Only six weeks ago, I mentioned the early retirement (after 8 rejections) of the awkwardly titled What happened while Don was watching the game, one of the silliest and least pretentious of my stories (and I’m counting Beans and marbles). Fellow Codexian Matt Rotundo commented on my post about the retirement, mentioning that it […]

Read More

Complete Works

AnthologyBuilder mastermind and editor Nancy Fulda informed me last night that Dumb Son was accepted for inclusion in the AnthologyBuilder database. Which means that as of last night, the complete collection of all my published stories is available for compilation into a collection. Details are on the Publications page on my site…

Read More

The Prisoner Will Be Released

The great Robert Heinlein formulated five rules of speculative fiction writing: You must write. You must finish what you write. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order. You must put the work on the market. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold. By sticking to these rules, especially […]

Read More

Toby’s Found A Home

The crowning piece of Good Stuff that happened to me yesterday was an email from Sniplits, informing me (after agonizing over the decision for 449 days*) that they would gladly buy my short story Dumb Son (or TSFKATT: The Story Formerly Known As Toby’s Trophies), for podcast publication. The tale of sweet, mentally challenged Toby, […]

Read More

Now On Podcast As Well: Deep Red

Accepted by PseudoPod four months before their sister podcast EscapePod accepted Beans and marbles, my suspense story Deep Red was finally produced by PseudoPod and uploaded to their site last Friday. (Oddly enough, they didn’t think to actually let me know it had gone up; I discovered the fact through a (very infrequent, of course) […]

Read More

Bean Pod

Just last night, editor Steve Eley over at EscapePod informed me that he would be delighted to buy Beans and marbles for podcast publication. That’s the second story that will soon be available for your iPod! Besides the obvious thrill of receiving an acceptance letter, it also gave me a moment of bemused contemplation at […]

Read More