Last day of the holiday. Back to work tomorrow, and that will be it til Christmas. Bleugh.
I haven't wallowed in any self-indulgent writing chatter for a while. Time to put things right. Work-in-progress, 'The Devil's Fauna', is in the queue at Critters. It's set in a similar world to a previous story of mine called 'Sacred Skin'. That story proved pretty successful, being published at bloodlust-uk.com and in the Cold Glass Pain anthology, edited by Chris Hall - and I was recently asked if it could be included in a 'Best of' anthology but I haven't heard anything of that since. Be nice if 'TDF' was as well received. We'll see.Once TDF has been critiqued, I shall put 'The Uinta Incident' through the same process. I wrote it early 2004 and, after it had been critiqued, I rewrote and submitted it to several pro markets. It got bounced back. But I did get some good advice from a couple of editors. TUI it seemed, was nearly a sale, but these two editors felt I hadn't explored the human consequences of the disaster that takes place at the end of the story. Expand it, they said. Tell us what happens next. It's taken me a long time, but I've finally figured what happens next. So now TUI is 5000 words compared to its former 3000, but has considerably more depth; albeit at the expense of much darker feel. Is it better? I'm sure all those lovely critters out there will be only to happy to tell me. And while I consider those two stories drafted, I have two more to complete. 'The Reconstruction of Kasper Schrodinger' (a satire on the cosmetic sugery industry) and an as yet untitled one about two guys recovering from their experiences in the Great War.
Unpublished tales languishing in submission hell are: 'Pretty Useless Says', 'No Dogs Allowed', 'Raising Archie', Sheep', The Emigrant', 'Four Minutes and Counting', 'Schrodinger's Bug' and 'Pig on a Motorcycle'. It would be nice if one of them found a home. I've also sent out 'Clob' as a possible reprint.
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