Musical Manuscripts

I got back three stories on Tuesday from Asimov's, Analog and SciFi.Com. I swapped them around and sent them off today to the same cast of characters.

Over on his blog, Jayme Blashcke has bemoaned the fact he gets good comments from editors - but they still reject the story. I know the way he feels. Here's some excerpts from the letters I got Tuesday:

Sheila Williams: "I thought the story had some powerful imagery, but it didn't quite work for me."

Ellen Datlow: "It's not at all bad, but I'm afraid I don't like it enough to buy it for the site."

Stan Schmidt: The story "has an interesting idea, but there's too little story built on it."

Well, I only get rejected by the best! I would imagine this would be really frustrating if I was trying to live off my writing - but I'm not. And I have a corpus of 25 stories right now bouncing around all different places, so I always have something else to shoot off when a rejection comes in.

I haven't bee able to write anything since about the 16th. I've had a great press at work, caused by the conclusion of the basketball season. Both our girls and boys basketball teams are in the playoffs, and so their games are now overlapping with the start of the baseball and softball seasons.

Well, ConDFW starts tomorrow. I really enjoyed it when I went two years ago. It was the first con I ever attended. Here's the web site:

http://www.condfw.org/

I heartily recommend it to anyone in the North Texas area.

Maybe I'll even pay for my registration! When I went in 2003, I got in on a media pass, because I worked for a paper in the DFW area. I DID run their news release.

I live farther away now, outside the region, so I guess I'll pay...

I didn't pre-register. Every time I've tried to pre-register for a convention, something comes up to stop my attendance. I lost $100 in 2003 that way. Ever since then, I just show up at the door, and everything is fine (it's more expensive, but it works).

I won't be able to attend the evening session Friday because of work - the local girls basketball team is playing a regional semi-final game - and they'll probably win, which will mean I also have to work Saturday night. Oh, well.

If they win Saturday, I'll have to go to Austin for the state tournament next week. They played there last year, also, and that was when I looked up Howard Waldrop and knocked on his door.

Both the girls and boys basketball team from my town are still n the playoffs. If everything goes off the way it should, I will have been covering games 5 out of 6 nights this week. I've already logged 750 miles driving and the week isn't over yet.