It’s been a while since my last submission update, so here goes. I’ll try to remember where everything is–I’m up at my parents’ place for a week and while submission tracking sheet is in Excel for some reason their computer doesn’t have Excel.

“Shipbreaker” was with Interzone. Jetse de Vries held it for a second reading (as I mentioned) and ended up giving another of his very kind, personalized rejections. He actually had some nice things to say about the story and, while I obviously would have liked to sell to IZ, I appreciate his thinking it deserved a second read and taking the time to let me know some of his reasoning for declining.

This is the third story of mine that Jetse’s turned away from IZ, but he’s always done so in a very classy manner. Given that the other two went on to sell quickly after Jetse declined–“Saturn in G Minor” won the WOTF contest, and “Citius, Altius, Fortius” sold to Tesseracts 11–maybe this one will follow the pattern?

Jetse was kind enough to suggest a couple of markets he thought it might fit with, and I sent it right out to one–Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.

“Gagiid” was with the Missouri Review after their earlier rewrite request, but has come back with a final ‘no’, unfortunately. I discovered subsequent to resubmitting that the person who sent the rewrite request was an editorial intern…and that she’d moved on by the time I resubmitted, so my champion was gone. Ah well. It might be a literary pipe dream to have it published in a lit journal or a mainstream magazine, but I’ll continue to dream it for now–I’ve sent it off to the Atlantic Monthly. We’ll see.

“The Festival of Toxcatl” is currently with Paradox. It’s one of the submissions I made before the US postal rates changed, so it’s six cents light on postage. The Missouri Review added some stamps–hopefully Paradox will do the same.

And I’m still waiting on word from Holy Horrors. My story, “The Hushed Voice”, has been with them since February. According to the editor’s blog, decisions should be made “in the near future.” They’ve already accepted at least a few stories and rejected a bunch of others, so fingers crossed that no news is good news.

I think that’s it for first-round submissions, however I am sending out my published stories for consideration in various “Year’s Best” anthologies. Again, this is likely somewhere between wishful thinking and delusions of grandeur, but what the hell, right?

So “Borrowed Time” is out for consideration in Best New Paranormal Romance 3 (yes, it includes a love story element), and it, along with “Saturn in G Minor” and “Citius, Altius, Fortius”, are going for consideration to The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 2.

– S.