Wood!

At last, a reason to blow my horn. Nanobison has accepted my story "In the Shadow of the Dragon's Wing" for publication in their April issue.

UPDATE: It's now available for your reading pleasure.

Hoodyhoo!

I wrote the first draft of "In the Shadow of the Dragon's Wing" back in about 1993 or '94, I can't remember exactly when, sitting in a tiny apartment in Johnson City, TN, up all night, writing and smoking and writing and smoking. (I smoked back in the day when I was a mountain man.) I smoked a whole pack of cigarettes that night between 9 PM and about 4 AM, when I finally, as they say and quite literally, crawled into bed.

The first place I sent the story was Dragon magazine. This was the first story I'd ever sent to anybody, anywhere, that came back with a critique. Of course, it also came back with a rejection. But that critique kept me going, kept me writing, and eventually I published an adventure in Dungeon magazine, which led to writing for Dragonlance, and so on and so forth, forever and ever amen.

Still, I always kept that critique in the back of my mind, as I reworked the story and rewrote it, trying to solve its fundamental problems. In January of this year, I finally came up with the angle that I thought it needed. I rewrote it one more time, sent it out, got a rejection, sent it to another place, got another rejection, sent it to Nanobison and bang!

In all, I sent this story to seven different magazines before it was finally accepted for publication.
So the moral of the story is, this story finally weighs the same as a duck. Well, on Nanobison's scale, anyway.

Curiously, this story is yet another story of a series that I wrote before my first novel was published. The stories are all set in a fantasy world I called Korr. With the addition of "In the Shadow of the Dragon's Wing," that makes five of those stories that have been published. And the characters Morgrify and Whortleberry Pinchpocket from "The Great Gully Dwarf Climacteric of 40 SC" were originally characters in another story I wrote for the world of Korr. That leaves only one story from that series that hasn't been published somewhere.

I almost have a full series going here. Maybe someday they'll be collected in an anthology.

And monkeys might fly out my butt.

Lost in Translation

If you are a native speaker of Portuguese and want to help me out, please contact me. I need a native speaker, or someone who is VERY fluent, to check my work.

I have a Portuguese-speaking character in a screenplay and I need to make sure she is saying what I think she is saying before I start submitting the screenplay to competitions.

So if you can help me, let me know.

It's a Fair Cop

Trying to figure out what editors want is like trying to prove that someone is a witch. If your story weighs as much as a duck, then it floats, and if it floats, it gets published.

If your story weighs more than a duck, they send it back with a form rejection. Not even a full-sized piece of paper. A quarter sheet, if you're lucky.

But if it weighs less than a duck (and thus floats), then your story is good but not right for the magazine. Or they just published a story just like it. Or they enjoyed it, but not enough to buy it.

If you're lucky, you've only waited a month to find out. More likely, it's taken three months.

Lately, I've seen a number of magazine guidelines that state something to the effect of, "the longer we have your story, the better your chances because we like it and are trying to make up our beautiful minds whether or not we want to publish it."

Only this isn't always true. I was just looking back through the record I keep of all the places I have sent stories, how long they kept them, and their responses. I've got stories that were out 5 months, 6 months, 7 months, 10 months, a year, only to receive a form letter rejection. You sit and wait month after month thinking, hey, this story might have a chance, and then one day you open your mailbox and there's your SASE with a tiny slip of paper about the size of a bookmark that says, we don't have time to respond personally to every submission.

Many of these magazines also don't accept simultaneous submissions, so your story ends up in limbo for months. If you're lucky, you get to send your story to four people during the course of a year. Break the rules and you better pray you don't get lucky and have two magazines accept the same story for publication - you'll be blackballed for life.

If only more magazine editors could be like Gordon Van Gelder at Fantasy and Science Fiction, or Chris East at Futurismic. Neither of these two fine gentlemen has ever published a story of mine, but neither have they sat on my stories for months on end only to send me a form rejection. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is one of the grandaddies of the genre. They probably receive hundreds of submissions a month, but not only does Gordon always respond within a month (and usually within 15 days), not only has he read every word of every story I've ever sent him (even the really long ones), he has never once sent me a form letter rejection. And to top it all off, he puts together a great magazine.

So if Gordon can do it, why can't everyone else?

If you can figure that out, you'll know why ducks and witches float.

Rats!

Sometimes being a writer is worse than being Charlie Brown. Not only don't you get invitations to parties, but sometimes you get a specific request to stay the hell away from their party, otherwise known as a rejection letter.

Charlie Brown once said, nothing echoes like an empty mailbox. That's not true. Nothing echoes like a form letter rejection in your otherwise empty mailbox, unless it is a form rejection accompanied by a solicitation to subscribe to the magazine that has just rejected your work.

The Fictionalized Life

Remember what I said about the value of a good back story when it comes to selling yourself and your work? It doesn't just apply to authors.

The New York Observer has a story about Nancy Grace, Goddess of Justice (Snap Judgment Division) and Our Lady of the Jerking Knee. Here's her celebrated back story about the tragedy that drove her to become an undefeated criminal prosecutor and vulgar harpy of prime time television:

As she tells it, in the summer of 1980, she was a 19-year-old college student in small-town Georgia, engaged to Keith Griffin, a star third baseman for the Valdosta State University Blazers. The wedding was a few months away. Then, one August morning, a stranger—a 24-year-old thug with a history of being on the wrong side of the law—accosted Griffin outside a convenience store. He shot him five times in the head and back, stole $35 from his wallet, and left him dead. Police soon tracked down the killer, and a new phase of suffering began for Ms. Grace. The suspect brazenly denied any involvement. At trial, Ms. Grace testified, then waited as jury deliberations dragged on for three days. The district attorney asked her if she wanted the death penalty, and in a moment of youthful weakness, she said no. The verdict came back guilty—life in prison—and a string of appeals ensued. For Nancy Grace, the ordeal she describes felt nothing like justice.

But that isn't really how it happened. What really happened isn't as engaging, or even all that motivating. What really happened was:

• Griffin was shot not by a random robber, but by a former co-worker.
• The killer, Tommy McCoy, was 19, not 24, and had no prior convictions.
• Mr. McCoy confessed to the crime the evening he was arrested.
• The jury convicted in a matter of hours, not days.
• Prosecutors asked for the death penalty, but didn’t get it, because Mr. McCoy was mildly retarded.
• Mr. McCoy never had an appeal; he filed a habeas application five years ago, and after a hearing it was rejected.

Killed by a disgruntled co-worker with no criminal record who confessed and never appealed doesn't sound as good on Larry King, especially not being able to portray her anguish as she suffered through endless appeals. It was a senseless tragedy, yes, but there wasn't enough suffering involved to turn Nancy Grace into the self-appointed crusader that she became.

Maybe her backstory is simple PR. Or maybe it hides a deeper motivation that has nothing to do with justice and the law. Only her shrink knows for sure.

But I'm guessing Nancy was pissed that McCoy didn't get the chair and if it hadn't been for the damn defense attorney and the soft-assed jury with their consideration of the murderer's state of mind, she would have gotten to see that retard fry, which is what she really wanted, God DAMMIT! and then she could have gone back to Shakespeare and lived a life of peace and beauty rather than become the aging frustrated gargoyle that she is today.