An acceptance and a rejection

I got one acceptance and a rewrite request for short stories today. Cold Shadows, a short story written as a prequel to one of my unpublished novels, The Laws of Summer, will be published in the May edition of Sorceress Signals.

Of course all the joy of acceptance was ruined by get a rejection for The Laws of Summer in my inbox at the same time. It seems like whenever I get an acceptance I always get a rejection the same day, maybe it’s a law of physics or something.

Anyway Guess its time to send it somewhere else. Angry Robot Books is opening to unsolicited subs for the month of March. So I am planning on editing the novel for a few weeks and then sending it off to them.

Work has been a little crazy, so I’ve been pretty tired at night, not getting a whole lot of writing done. The server went down at work so we have had to go old school. When anybody checks out a book we have to write it down. We can’t make new library cards and we have a huge stack of books to check-in when we get our server going again.

Christmas 2010

Christmas is over. I had a lot of fun with my family and really enjoyed most of my break. Except for the fact that I decided to catch the stomach flu on Christmas night. I won’t go into details but I was violently ill, sick enough that my wife almost took me to the ER.

But everyone at work had the stomach flu the week before, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t food poisoning, so I toughed it out. I am hoping when I look back at this Christmas I remember all the fun stuff and forget about the projectile vomiting.

My wife really liked her presents. I got her a kindle, a king size electric blanket(she has wanted one for years), and some pens with her name on them. I think I did a good job picking out presents, she really seemed to enjoy them. She got me a laptop, which was awesome because the mouse buttons on mine had stopped working just a week before Christmas. My other family members (cousins, aunts, uncles, and my father in law) got me an array of t-shirts, a nice metal book mark with my initials engraved, and a signed Orson Scott Card novel.

Like I said the family was a lot of fun this year, no drama, no arguments. After everybody left I got a little down. It happens every year, I start to miss my parents, both of whom have passed away. But it didn’t last very long this year. I guess time really does heal all wounds.

I did get a little writing done, as you can see progress on Blood Plague has gone up another couple of percentile. And I sent some queries to agents for the Laws of Summer, we’ll see how that works out.

Happy New Year!

An Acceptance and Other Writing News

My short story, Blood of Warriors, Blood of Kings, just got accept to Iron Bound Ezine. I'll post a link when it is live. The story is a short fantasy piece that I wrote for one of our shootout competitions. So I got quite a bit of feedback on it, every author in the shoot out made comments. About half of them really liked and about half of them really didn’t. I got comments like- this was great, reminds me of Robert Howard, and I love sword and sorcery this was awesome. I also got- this reminds me of a bad fantasy movie. So if you like sword and sorcery you’ll probably like if you don’t, you probably won’t.

I made it to 5000 words in my new novel, The Blood Plague, and I am hoping to get another couple thousand words done before I go to bed. The novel is set in a fantasy world that is torn apart by a devastating plague. So it’s kind of an apocalyptic fantasy novel, and so far it has been really fun to write.

Finally, I received two more rejections for my novel, The Laws of Summer. One was a personal rejection. All the editors who read it say the same thing "We enjoyed your novel", "We like your writing style", etc. And then the big but comes, "But in the current economy, sword and sorcery fantasy is very hard to market” Sometimes they call it heroic fantasy, sometimes they just say fantasy, or sometimes they say novels in this genre, but they all mean the same thing.

I thought this might be some kind of industry standard rejection but many of the letters go on to talk about specific ways to improve the novel. Which I don't understand at all if it isn't marketable, but my rant about that is a little off topic so I will refrain from going on about it.

My conclusion?

The fantasy stories I like to write apparently aren't what publishers want. This leaves me with a couple of problems.

First, the novels I write are the kind that I like to read. Therefore, the novels I like to read are not "marketable" this must be why I am having so much trouble finding anything that looks interesting, from a new author, at the book store. My “books to read” shelf is growing smaller and smaller.

Second, main stream publishers have absolutely no interest in my novel. I have a few mid list publishers that I want to try, after that I am not sure what to do with the novel. I am not sure I want to send it to a small press. Not because I dislike small presses in any way or have anything bad to say about them. I have read a lot of good stuff from small presses in the last couple of years.

It is because Jessy and I own a small press, and it seems silly to send it to another small press to make 15% royalties when we could do it ourselves and make 100%. On the other hand we did not start Pill Hill to publish our own work. Not that there would be anything wrong with an owner of a small press publishing their own stuff. I already have a few short stories in some Pill Hill anthos (mostly because people didn't return contracts and we wanted to have a specific number of stories).

But if we publish my novel I am always going to wonder if it was good enough to publish. Yeah, I am one of those writers, the kind that thinks everything I write is crap until someone tells me different, then I assume that they also think it is crap but are trying to be nice.

Anyway, maybe I can find a small press that is well respected or one that pays advances. I’ll have to do a little research. If I send it to a small press I want to be sure they can bring something to the table that Pill Hill cannot. Hmmm…Or maybe I can spend half the night blogging in circles because I don’t really have a point and I am not sure what I want to do.

I am going to stop now and write a chapter in Blood Plague. Writing is so much easier than getting published.