An Indigo Mind » Submissions

First Sale!

admin — Tue, 24 May 2011 02:47:00 +0000

I meant to post this last Thursday, but these days my status at any given moment is either busy, exhausted, or asleep. Spring has come and gone, and the hot temperatures it left in its wake leave me sluggish and introspective.

A week ago I received the contract for my first sale of a short story. “The Girl Who Folded Dragons” will appear in Sword & Sorceress 26, due out in November from Norilana Books.

Its been a surreal and emotional week. Having a story in Sword & Sorceress has been a mini-dream of mine for nearly as long as I have been writing. The first writing advice I ever received was from the introductions of each volume. I read them over and over, absorbing and dreaming.

I only wish my dad could have been here to see me achieve this. I promised him that this is my year, and I guess it is.

One other thing – my friend Heather’s second story, “Soiled Doves” in the anthology How The West Was Wicked, is now available from Pill Hill Press on the Nook and the Kindle.

Deadline Trains

admin — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:56:53 +0000

Deadlines feel something like trains to me. There is the bullet train deadlines, the ones you don’t know about until they’re on you, and the far scarier freight train deadlines, where you can feel it coming long before it reachs. You can hear them coming, but then the ground shakes and the noise gets louder as they get closer and closer. Inevitably baring down.

But then comes the moments after the submission is actually made, which I find far more frightening then anything that came before. Because the event horizon has been crossed, and there’s no turning back – any mistakes are there to stay. Until that point things are fluid and can be changed, but after…

I submitted my story to Sword and Sorceress 24 on Friday. It wasn’t the story I was originally going to send, but the one I’d been writing wasn’t close to finished. The story I submitted was one of the few short story I’ve ever written without a specfic market in mind, so it feels strange to me. I’m not a natural short story writer at all, my ideas always seem to unfold into something larger and longer and I’m always struggling to stay under wordcount limits on my short fiction. I also habitually run up against the deadline no matter how hard I try, which does nothing for my nerves.

I already have my response back from my S&S submission. It was a encouraging rejection, which can be sumed up as – “good story, but it didn’t have what I was looking for.” It’s always nice to hear that my stories are readable from someone new. :)

The First

admin — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:44:50 +0000

I got my first rejection Saturday. It was for my short story for the Sword and Sorceress Anthology. I got a short, but nicely worded form response that can be summed up as ‘not for us, try elsewhere’. Perhaps all my research and reading has paid off as I was underwhelmed by my causal acceptance. *laugh*

Taking a page from Stephen King’s On Writing I’ve stuck the email on the metaphorical rejections nail and have gone back to writing. Or outlining rather. Hopefully if I actually work out the plot until the end of this book maybe I’ll actually get that far.