Wips

It’s been a week for rejections.

Scape declined to accept my social network story; Electric Spec didn’t like my alternate history tale; Strange Horizons failed to see the merits of my time loop piece; Reflection’s Edge didn’t appreciate my speculative sculptor parable; and Abyss and Apex decided not to publish my attempt at supernatural-noir, although it was “well-received.” Does that mean they liked it? Regardless, each rejected submission found itself revised and submitted elsewhere before it even had a chance to sniffle.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a new 6,000-word story that came to me in a dream. I finished jotting down a rough draft longhand-style last month but didn’t really know where it was going. All I remembered was the vivid image of a man lying face-down on a bed in a 1970’s motel room (green shag carpet, rust-colored drapes, cabinet TV) who wakes up to find he’s trapped with no way out. I’m having fun revising it, and after a few more edits, it should be ready for its first rejection!

I’ve also jumped back into my novel-length work-in-progress. It’s a sequel to an unpublished novel I wrote two years ago, and all was going well until the plot went off on a tangent and hit a brick wall. The remedy to this situation will involve cutting out a couple thousand words, but there’s nothing quite like a good verbal lobotomy to get a story back on track.

In other news, last Friday I learned about “Twitter Fiction” from esteemed writer/editor Stephen Ramey’s blog. Trapeze Magazine accepts stories of 140 characters or less. Figured I’d give it a try. Easy, right? Wrong. The editor summarily rejected my submission but asked for a rewrite; so I tried again. Result: my first Tweet-sized story will appear in Trapeze on 9.16.10.