Brief sales (well, not sales, but activity) update:

• submitted to Abyss & Apex magazine and got rejected after three weeks. Not sure whether it's a form rejection or not. It says the story was "well received here, but after some thought [the editors] decided not to accept it for publication". Probably form, but a form letter that is mindful of the author's feelings :-)
• submitted to the Hadley Rille anthology Destination Future, just today, so no results yet. They seem to be quite fast to respond, according to Duotrope stats.

Our baby boy is doing fine, breathing on his own since this afternoon. He's still on the NICU of course, and needs round the clock care and monitoring.

Combined with my wife's recovery from the C-section, blogging activity will be intermittent to nonexistant. Writing fiction not planned for the next few weeks.
Total exhaustion of the mind has sapped away the creative drive. Let's hope it comes back soon.

Oh yes. Got a rejection from Futurismic, but couldn't care less in these circumstances!

Destination: Future is the title of an upcoming anthology by Hadley Rille books. They're looking for submissions in the SF field, pay 3 cents a word plus royalties if the book earns its expenses back.

Note to self: write and submit to this one. No excuses this time.

Just for your and my reference, I submitted The Snow Fell Fast to Futurismic on Monday. I changed some minor things based on some helpful crits on the OWW. It's now out there, on its own feet, living its own life and I had to let it go...

Another milestone reached today: fifth-ever rejection letter, this time in a record time of one (1) day! Clarkesworld Magazine didn't like The Snow.... I decided to repost it for crits on the OWW, perhaps it is still missing something.

Clarkesworld Magazine is a nice market though: they have some very good stories up, they pay pro rates and the submission system is top notch. Kudos to the editors for that: they have an online submission status tracker that is perfectly designed. Very simple, tells you the status of the submission and even its place in the slush pile queue. Very nicely done!

Sadly, I didn't even have the chance to fully the status page, by the time I went to check my story had been rejected. Well, better luck next time...

So. I got some great news yesterday - I made my first fiction sale!

Three cheers for myself, and all, even though it's quite a tiny sale. More specifically, a nanosale for twitterfiction. If you haven't heard of the concept, check out my Twitter feed. Twitter is a social site that allows you to broadcast tiny little updates about what you're doing, random observations, or short haiku-like statements to people who subscribe to your twitter feed. Very short, in fact, because posts are limited to 140 characters.

Jetse de Vries, formerly of Interzone and currently preparing the Shine positive SF anthology, runs a "twittermag" called Outshine. What's a twittermag, I can hear some of you thinking back at me? Well, it's a dedicated twitter feed on which he publishes SFnal "tweets" (twitterspeak for posts) that speak to the imagination. Sort of an instant SF magazine.
My second submission to Outshine was accepted. It will be published on April 29th, if the current planning holds up.

In other news, I am editing my third short story, The Snow Fell Fast and Final, after getting some majorly useful crits from an online workshop. More on that in a later post.

To Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, the magazine with the longest name known to man.

I expect a three month wait for a response, but I'm confident I'll have two or three other stories to submit by that time.

A little update was overdue here. In between Fallout 3 sessions (I know, I know, it's Evil Procrastination Incarnate, but hell is it a great game) I finished the rewrite of Total Immersion. It ended up at almost 8,000 words and at that it's on the borderline between a novelette and a short story.

Of course, typically for my luck, that makes it harder to find a market for. Anyway, it just goes to show that I need to write up one or two of my other ideas right away. Tomorrow, perhaps...

Off to bed now!

My literary prowess is growing by the hour. I have just received my second rejection for Total Immersion - hurrah. Well okay, maybe I'm not quite feeling that hurrah deep down, but still, I am somewhat proud to have received a personal rejection this time.

Chris East from Futurismic sent me a little e-mail that commented on the writing and the story, and in short it came down to "there's some good stuff there but it's not up to par throughout". 

And you know what, I cannot agree more. I really have to sit down, go through the second half of the story and give a good, critical edit. In my hurry to get my stuff out there, I never paid as much attention to the second part of this short story as I did to the first half. I knew that, but I still sent it out, violating one of the basic tenets of writing as testified everywhere on the net, i.e. "Write, edit until polished, and only then submit".

The Futurismic editor did include the magical comment "We hope to see more of your work", which, if I can believe what various editorial blogs out there have taught me, really does mean they would like to see more (better) work. 

Time to start writing in earnest again, I suppose. After my previous writing post I haven't really written much, I've been chewing on some plot hooks that have going in circles in that foul broth of half-baked ideas and unrounded characters that is my mind at the moment. But I feel as though a few of them are nearing the point where I can sit down and write. Fingers crossed!

This is day one. The first day of my writing life. It is not the day on which I first wrote fiction; not at all. That started months ago. However, I have been reading quite a few writerly blogs and they have taught me that you become a writer when you get your first rejection slip.

And today is the day. My very first piece of fiction ever (well, since high school at least), a 5,500 word short called Total Immersion got a form rejection from Strange Horizons. Quite predictably, of course. I just saw that Jed, the fiction editor who dealt with my submission read over 60 subs on a Saturday... ouch!

Still, as a newbie I am still full of unrealistic hopes and dreams of how my writing will leap out of the slush pile, how wildly enthusiastic editors will brawl over the right to publish it, and undying fame and glory will be my part.

No such luck today though :-)

For the record, I also submitted a flash piece to Apex Digest for the Halloween competition (I was surprised how difficult it is to tell any kind of story in less than 1,000 words!) and I've just resubmitted Total Immersion, this time to Futurismic.