My writing updates

16 May 2013

Yes, The Third Floor sold to Ray Bradbury Tribute anthology – Dandelions of Mars – coming out soon from Whortleberry Press.The thing about the story is that I originally wrote it back in 1987 for a competition being held by the Australian SF Foundation for Best Unpublished Story. That was allied to their National Convention which I attended that year, and my story won. I proudly display the medal on the wall (along with my five Vogel Awards, and half a dozen Muse Medallions from the International Cat Awiters Association) and it’s pleasant to see how well the story is holding up.

8 May 2013

the revision for my collection of SF/F cat stories, now officially titled Katalagein, progresses, but as I’m also scrambing to clear articles and reviews owed in several places, it’s keeping me hopping. One of the most recent articles has been a furious “While Stocks Last”  legal Trickery, which appeared in our local newspaper recently and which I’ll shortly be posting on my own site and offering to a major site to which I belong.

28 April 2013

My collaborator (Sharman Horwood) and I were delighted to note that our time travel/alternate history Sf novel, QUEEN OF IRON YEARS is on the official ballot. Should this book win it will, so far as I know, be the first GLBT-themed fiction to have won a Vogel, (or indeed to have won any of that award’s predessors.) I’ll be attending Au Contraire 2 in mid-July when the SJV results are ann0unced and we’re hoping Sharman will be able to make it there as well. Looking forward to seeing everyone then.

 

18 April 2013

I’ve had three in our local paper in the past few weeks. I write articles that are hints, tips and cheap remedies, mostly while saving cash, and I do a few articles whenever I feel the inclination. The paper slushpiles them and they’re used as a Saturday feature when there’s a gap. March saw articles on Remedies from the Kitchen Cupboard for Coughs, Cold, and Sore Throats, and on How to banish Fleas, while in April one appeared on Easy Uses for Stale Bread. (And yes, you’d be surprised at how many there are, and into  how many areas usages of that  can spread.)

9 April 2013

Yes, not that it was telescoped to quite the extent it appears from the above, but I was late-ish sending it in, and the anthology seems to have broken the speed record getting here after publication too. So, I can announce both that I sold The Mystery of Lucky to Strange Lucky Mysteries 5, and that my author copy got here this morning. If all goes well, Steve will be doing a review for the anthology to appear in the reviews section over the weekend.

28 March 2013

Hadrosaur Press does a good magazine entitled Tales of the Talisman, and in the past year I’ve been happy to find two stories accepted. The first, a brutal weird Western entitled, I shall Do Nothing, is due out shortly. This second sale is of my fantasy noir story, Realities. TotT seems to prefer my more unpleasant themes.

 

 

 

6 March 2013

Lucky Break magazine is a useful venue as well as being an excellent magazine to read. Frankly I despise most of the celebrity magazines in which all you read about is people who are famous for being famous, and who behave stupidly, criminally or disgustingly. With LB (and That’s Life, a similar Australian magazine) you get stories about real people and a host of interesting competitions. Much more bang for your buck. Recently I’ve had or sold two short items to Lucky Break, one on “what makes a good date,” and the other – to appear shortly – on “why you shouldn’t always listen to doctors”. I’ve been writing the occasional item published in LB since they started some years ago, and as it’s one of the few NZ venues that pays well, treats contributers well, and does a nice production, other kiwi writers out there could do a lot worse than to consider this market.

26 February 2013

I didn’t spend my Christmas/New Year break doing nothing. I planned to begin a new book on January 14^th and wanted a stack of short work submissions out before that, the more so as over late December I’d written a number of new stories and several new articles which needed to find homes. And I like to keep a good number of submissions circling. Which brings me to what started this item. A writer friend asked me over Christmas if I didn’t get bothered by rejections. I grinned. The truth is that at any one time I’ll have between 20 and 35 submissions out, not the one or two at a time that she does. That’s why she finds rejection wounding. She has so much invested in each one. Say your investment in submissions is 100. She has two stories out, so a rejection on one is 50% and devastating. For the purpose of this I did a check. Currently out on submission at the time she asked, I had: 27 short stories, 7 articles, two books, two copies of my books for review, 2 contest entries, and a query letter. That’s more than usual but it happens that way when I’m about to begin a new book and want a head start. Of that 41, I expect to receive favourable response to about 10-12. So of 100% I have around 2.5 % invested in each result. And I expect a good outcome in about 25%. Wounded by the rejections I receive? Actually, not much, I’m too busy sending out another batch of submissions or writing new stuff. I’m always sorry if a book is rejected, but not devastated. It will probably sell sooner or later and right now I can’t hang about being wrecked over a book rejection, the new book is moving along well, and that’s more important. I know where I want to offer it and -

oh, yes, I’ve sold six of those articles and two of the stories to date, the query may end up in further sales mid-year, and one of the QUEEN OF IRON YEARS copies out for review has received rave reviews in three places. Bothered by rejections? Not pygmalian likely!

18 February 2013

Timeline. Early February 2012 – I submit an original story to what sounds like an interesting anthology. Early November I thought I’d catch up on how the Rollicking Tales anthology was going, to find that it seemed to have vanished. I discovered a possible email address and queried. To be told by email from the editor, that:

“the anthology has not folded. I’ve been having trouble with the email address and webiste and my technical no how don’t seem to be up to sorting it out, though I hope to get them running again as soon as I can…I will inform everyone involved of any decision I come to as soon as it is made.”

Noting on Jan.15th that I’d heard nothing as yet I decided to check, to discover that a decision was made a week and a half earlier to dump the anthology, something that had not been communicated to me as promised in that earlier personal email.

I then sent an email that said more or less that: This was more in sorrow than in anger, but I’d lost almost a year with the submitted work and that isn’t useful. Things go wrong that may be unavoidable, but it always pays to keep people in touch with events. Not doing so, and leaving an author hanging for this length of time isn’t good either for the author or the editor’s reputation. I wish him well in other endeavours, but note that in view of this track record, I won’t be associated with any of them,

Email sent to the editor on January15 ^{th and also posted to his site}. Further developments have been that:I’ve received no reply or any form of response, and the post did not appear in the site, despite the editor continuing to post there. Colour me very very unimpressed.

 

5 February 2013

The Dannevirke News is probably the smallest daily newspaper still in existance, it’s been in print too for over 120 years and now and again when something attracts my attention as a subject, I write an article for them. Often these are based on how to save money in some way, shape, or form, or on something that I’ve discovered on a subject and think may not be known to others. I normally have 4-5 articles in their slush pile for times when news is scarce, which it may have been last month since on checking I find that they used one of my articles each of three Saturdays in the expanded issues. Thus  I find that I informed their readers on – Uses for Honey and Cinnamon, Surprising Things You Can Do With Toothpaste, and Uses For Canned Fish. This may go a long way to explaining why strangers in local supermarkets ask me what they should buy.

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