Good News & More

After three weeks of waiting, and sending harassing emails, I finally got a response from Anthony Shields, editor of Midwest Literary Magazine, regarding the print publication that will feature my story "Goldie". I'm pretty sure I've already talked about this, but if not, here's the gist of it: MLM accepted my story for their ezine back in February, and apparently they liked it enough that they put it in their print anthology "Hanging By Threads". Well, there was no contract, no payment, no big deal, but as a result, I was never told that they had decided to put me in the anthology. Why is that a problem? Because they're a very small press and they sold out of the books before I ever knew I was in it.

Well, thankfully, Mr. Shields was kind enough to offer me the copy from his own bookshelf. So that will be shipping shortly, and for the first time in my life, I will have a copy of a print anthology featuring....me. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

OK, on other fronts, I did more digging in my hard drive the other night, and found "GPS", a story about--you guessed it--an evil GPS unit. Now, this really, really stunned me. Back in March of 2009, I submitted it to the then-fledgling Macabre Cadaver magazine, and received a form-letter rejection a little more than a month later. Looking at it now, I see that it wasn't even in Standard Manuscript Format, it was in the wrong font, it was in 10-point type...it was just a mess, all-around. Now, I'm not saying that's why the story was rejected, but I am saying that there's no way it helped.

So I'm currently going through and revising, because I remember how I originally liked the story. It's classic "took a wrong turn, now I'm in hell" horror, and it weighs in at a whopping 7,500 words. I had forgotten that. So I guess that's how I'll spend the last hours of this fine evening, and probably the wee hours of the morning. I'd like to be able to say I have five stories on the market, after all.