Scarlet Letters

I just had the fastest rejection of my career. Digging through the laptop, I found a couple of utterly silly super-short horror pieces. They were serviceable, though not incredible. So I fired them off. One, "Bargaining With Spiders," I sent to a low-pay webzine at 10:37 p.m. Response came at 8:58 a.m. "Thanks for submitting this, but unfortunately I'm going to pass. Thanks again." Wow, I've got whiplash. Hey, the story isn't any great shakes. But it's a good reminder that despite what some dear, sweet readers said, I can't get my laundry list published quite yet. Not that the spider piece is my laundry list, I actually rather like it. But then I never did have much luck with magazines. Putting my ego back in the Sucrets box...

This, right here, is the nicest thing anyone's written about me since a reader asked me if I was Harlan Ellison incognito: "But THEN there was Elizabeth's (reading), and she read the first few chapters of her newest book, which won't be out until September, Abaddon. This is the third in her Nocturnal Urges series, all of which are brilliant, AND SHE KILLED ME. Seriously, she pulls absolutely no punches in the beginning of Abaddon, and between chapters I keeled over on the seat and cried 'I'm DYING!' DAMN YOU, Elizabeth!! I will go absolutely nuts waiting for September to get here now!!! Later the three of us (Elizabeth, Alicia and I) were standing around discussing things, and Elizabeth was all grins and bounces as she contemplated the evil she will unleash once the book actually comes out. I like her so much." That's Sabrina Hunt, author and publisher of Circle Dark Publishing, and bless you, Sabrina. You totally made my day with that. Where to be...

Apologies, gentle readers. Whenever the blog is republished, Blogger dumps six months of posts into the feed. I was hoping the recent overhaul at Blogger (combining with Google, requiring a republish) would get rid of that little quirk. As it is, I can't make major changes to the blog without dumping half a year's entries into your feeds. For this reason alone, I am considering moving this blog out of Blogger. I am open to suggestions for good hosting places. Typepad, perhaps? (Yes, I'm already on Livejournal, Multiply and MySpace, and considering joining Yack. But those are more social, less professional. Save MySpace, which is pretty much just advertising. Then there's my website, my nine email addresses and the CultureGeek blog. Nobody can ever say they can't find me online.)

BIG NEWS! The great... big... announcement... is.... Not here yet. Ha. Gotcha. Almost time, I swear, and I know I've been teasing you with that one for waaaaay too long. We're moments away, I promise! Just no jinxing, okay? In the meantime, feast yer eyes on this! • "Wonderland" is a finalist for the Darrell Award! "Wonderland" is one of my favorite short stories, cursed by a little trick called epistolary format to be generally unpublishable, at least in magazines. In epistolary format, the entire story is told through letters, emails, news accounts, etc. In practical publishing terms, this means the same story takes twice as much literal space on the page. Even though it was no longer in word count than, say, "Deep Breathing," "Wonderland" was nearly twice as long in terms of page count, and that was too much for most magazines. After we decided to include it in SETTING SUNS, my poor editor texted me: FRANK: I hate italics. FRANK: Oh, a...