I have had a work in progress for over a year now. Which is to say I've been preparing to work on a historical novel for over a year, but…
It is just under a year since my last blog entry here. Not because I have been inactive. More because I have nothing to report on the writing front. During…
Here in the depth of the Davisville winter (grey mornings and sometimes full days of tule fog), I have decided to revamp my website. In doing so, I've been looking back on my desultory blog posts, and realize that in the last couple years they've mostly been just about publications and public performances of my work. It feels a little bit like braggery. I feel like I need to explain.
Black Fork Review has just accepted "San Andreas' Fault" for publication. Not only is that just cool in and of itself, but with this news coming just a couple weeks after littlesomethingspress accepted "Peanut Butter" for publication, it's like manna from heaven.
Ethan Ireland read my story "San Andreas' Fault" last night at Stories on Stage-Sacramento. The other story was an excerpt from An Excess Male by Maggie Shen. Together, our stories comprised a sort of quasi sci-fi evening of fiction. SOSS billed it as "dabbling in dystopia and tinkering with time." The "tinkering with time" part being my contribution.
I just learned today that Kestrel has accepted my story "DACAmented" for publication. It should appear sometime next spring. That's a long lead time”nine months or so”but I'm grateful. This acceptance came out of the blue after a number of rejections.
Elizabeth MacDuffie, Editor-in-Chief of Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, contacted me to say she was going to publish "Sailing Lessons" in the next issue. I'm so glad this story is finally finding a home. Even though Stories on Stage-Davis acceptet it for reading, it has been rejected by forty other publications. So, either I finally edited it down to a publishable form, or, as is often the case, editors' tastes simply differ.
I just heard from Stephanie Manuzak, Managing Editor of StoryQuarterly, that they've accepted my story "the Rides of March for publication. This is a great publication, established back in 1975, and I couldn't be happier. The story is taken from a draft of a novel by the same name. I actually shopped the novel around to agents and drew zero interest. I mean zip.
My first short story, "Fire Illness," has just been published. It was named Runner-Up in the 2016 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize hosted by Hunger Mountain, the literary Journal of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Matt Bell was the guest judge.
Last April, after sending out around fifty queries for two novels, and probably twice that many short story submissions over the past three years, with no success, I decided to…