It’s been a while since I reached into my giant stack of rejection letters, so I decided it was time to consult the Gods of Randomness to see which section and document I should pull out and scan for everyone’s edification. This week, they chose the letter “M” and the eighth position, which is somewhat appropriate, since that rejection was for a short story called “Love and the Tides of Darkness” (hereafter “LatToD”) that I originally wrote specifically for an anthology called On the Eighth Day, the theme of which was something to the effect of “What happened after the end of the beginning of the Old Testament?”, or something like that. (Hey, it was a long time ago, I don’t remember exactly.) In a nutshell, the concept of “LatToD” is that, near the end of the 20th Century, a potential new Savior of Mankind is born. Heaven sends an angel to guard him, and Hell sends a demon to assassinate him; but the angel and the demon turn out to have been romantic partners, back before The Fall, and they end up getting so sidetracked in squabbling with each other that neither one of them carries out their mission, leaving said potential Savior to go ahead and completely screw up his life all on his own.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Maelstrom Magazine, “Love and the Tides of Darkness””Category: Writing
Neither A Review Of “Quantumania” Nor “Ambulance”
So if you live here in the U.S., or you just know stuff, then you are likely aware that we recently celebrated Independence Day. This typically involves things that go boom, i.e., fireworks, ranging from people setting off firecrackers in the street to window-rattling municipal displays. Oh, and also, frightened pets.
Continue reading “Neither A Review Of “Quantumania” Nor “Ambulance””Teaser Tuesday: “Perhaps the Stars”
So this week I was reading Perhaps the Stars, the final book of “Terra Ignota”:
Random Rejections: Welsh Publishing Group
So this week I decided to ask the Gods of Randomness to pick a folder and position in my vast trove of rejection (and a few acceptance) letters, and lo! They told me I should look in the folder labeled “W” and find the seventh item therein, which, as it turns out, was in fact two items stapled together. Here’s the first one:
Continue reading “Random Rejections: Welsh Publishing Group”Teaser Tuesday: Seabury Quinn, “The Horror on the Links”
So for a while now I’ve been reading a volume of collected stories by Seabury Quinn:
Twofer Teaser Tuesday
So in the past few weeks I’ve read a couple of books where I decided to snip things for a Teaser Tuesday, even though, technically, on Teaser Tuesday, you’re supposed to take two sentences from whatever book you’re reading on that very day and use that as your teaser. But hey, you know how it is …
Random Rejectance: “Storyteller” Magazine
So since last week I posted a rather depressing update on my Blue Roses progress, I figured that this week, I would cheer everyone up by dipping into my vast pile of rejection letters. 😁👍
On this occasion, the Gods of Randomness told me I should look in the “S” folder of my expandable file, which, as you can imagine based on the prevalence of “S” in the English language is one of the more well-populated ones. And what should I find on top in that section but two letters from the Canadian magazine Storyteller, of which one was, as expected, a rejection, but the other was one of those rarer beasts, an acceptance. So in the interest of inducing a little mood whiplash, I scanned them both. First, let’s do the rejection:
Continue reading “Random Rejectance: “Storyteller” Magazine”Teaser Tuesday: “A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos”
So this week (and for a couple of weeks previously) I’ve been reading the horror anthology A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which, as you may have gleaned from the title, consists of a bunch of stories residing in the general neighborhood of H.P. Lovecraft.
Teaser Tuesday: “The Quantum Thief”
So this week I was reading The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi:
Teaser Tuesday: “Ice”
So this week I was reading Ice, by Anna Kavan:
Viscosity 