I just found the dumbest word in human creation, "cerebration."  If you don't know, it means the act or product of thinking.  How many times have you ever heard someone walk up to you and say, "Hey guess what!  I just had a cerebration!"  Until today I didn't even know the word existed, and I sort of wish it had stayed that way.

I'm all for big words.  I like the word 'quixotic', and found it very useful when my sister started dating.  I find seldom used words like 'abhor' descriptive enough to add to my every day language.  I do not see the use of a confusing long winded and positively scientific sounding word to replace something so simple as 'thought'.  It drives me up the wall.  I don't "cerebrate" I just think

As writer's we're supposed to embrace language, but am I the only one who thinks its time to go through the dictionary and make some deletions? Come on. There's got to be limits.

I just bought a new copy of Wild Horses by Dick Francis, and began it yesterday as my car book. (No, I don't read while driving just while on break and at lunch.) The book sucked me in as Dick Francis predictably does, but one thing was new this time around. I'm pretty good at picking up on his typical characters and how he handles them--he had an almost new character in this book. Very subtle too, and powerfully written. He was so well written in fact that I found myself fuming over him while working, and how agrivating he was, and how much I hated him, and how much I just wanted him to die, and then I realized I was fuming over someone who wasn't real. Dick Francis managed to do what only one other writer (Stephen King) has ever done before, make me unable to drop my suspension of disbelief and return to real life. I forgot it wasn't real.

I've found myself spending less and less time just reading a book for the simple pleasure of it, and more and more time paying attention to how it was crafted. I enjoy the story the same amount, mind, but a particularly well crafted sentence will have me zeroing in on it to see why I liked it. I've devoured books lately just to see how the good writers write. I learn, cannibalize, sharpen my own voice, and hope that somehow I'm getting better. It's what all writer's do I suppose, and its enlightening in some ways, but unnerving when you find your own writing getting better.

Anyway, just wanted to get that out of my system. The real point of this post was to inform you that Diamond Killers finally received a little bit of notice. A nice lady from the Student's Choice at Whidbey Writer's Workshop bought me a one year subscription to shortshortshort.com as a thank you for entering the contest in its first year. It was a really nice touch, and I feel well pleased with the kindness of these people.  Since they were so kind, I'm going to return the favor and put their website out there as far as I am able. They deserve to be noticed, and they deserve as many connections in the writing world as they can muster. Any writing big-wigs out there? Go here:
http://www.whidbeystudents.com/WSContest.htm

Go look! *pokes you to it*

http://www.thewriterseye.com/thewriterseye_fiction_003_1.html

I got a critique on a story this week that has gotten me thinking. The critique was for my story, "Second Sight" which I hope to start sending out in the next week or so, and its from the perspective of a blind girl. I was very concerned about it because it took a great deal of effort to make that perspective readable. Everyone who critiqued my story did a brilliant job, but one persons critique made me think a bit more than the rest.

To be honest I think the person critiqueing the story has a chip on his shoulder when it comes down to disabilities. He felt that to accurately portray the perspective of a blind person I should all but handicap the reader as well. He wanted me to have the character identify people by smell, even by the smell of their sweat, feel every waft of air that tells her someone is going by, brutally cut every word that has to do with vision, and make the reader feel completely blacked out.

The critique was good, but at the same time I don't think the person who critiqued it really knew what I was trying to do with the story. I didn't want to write a story about BLINDNESS and how awful it is to be HANDICAPPED and the main character is a CRIPPLE who can't see anything because she is BLIND and you as the reader should feel BLIND too because its hard being HANDICAPPED.

I wanted the story to be about the actual plot, where the MC happens to have a problem. She can't see. That's part of the plot line, but its not the whole deal. I didn't want the focus to be on the fact that she's blind. I wanted the people reading to see the character, to feel her personality, and to accept the fact that she can't see without focusing on it.

Its true that everything he said was true. I have no doubt that people with severe vision loss end up depending on their nose as much as their ears. I did not use the MC's nose or, tongue nearly as much as I used her ears. Why? Because its easier for the reader to identify with someone who recognizes a familiar voice than it is for them to identify with someone who can tell where someone is standing by smell alone. The last thing I wanted to do is make someone feel alienated from the character because she was BLIND.

So I was careful about the words I chose. In the very first paragraph I had her refer to the beach she was sitting on as a very 'visual' place. I felt the word worked well for the picture she could form with sound, smell, and touch. Its a word that readers can understand, and I don't feel they're going to become confused about whether she can see or not when I've just spent five or six sentences explaining how its visual.

It ended up making me think though. How much do we owe our readers when it comes down to accuracy? Is the correct portrayal of a character more important than all the details? Is what the writer intended more important than what the facts allow? Where do you draw the line between accuracy and art?

Sometimes I hate writing. The more I develop and grow and find out, the more questions I have.

On the Premises picked 10 winners this contest for their theme, "Goodbye to all that." I know because I wasn't one of them. =3  That's one of the first rejections I've gotten where I actually feel kind of disappointed. I really like the quality of the stories featured on that website, and I was hoping they'd feel my writing was on the same level. According to their email however, they got a record 166 entries. I can only hope they didn't pick me because they had to stop at 10 winners. I still think the story I sent them is pretty good, so I'll run it through Critique Circle a couple more times and send it off to someone else. Maybe an Anthology. Hmm.

On the bright side, "All Keyed Up" will be published in the March addition of The Writer's Eye magazine, and I've been asked to speak in a class at Moorpark College on how to get published. Not bad eh? I'll post the link to the story when its available.

"Poetry is the art of approaching language differently."

The answer to my question written by a very talented poet I saw today, Douglas Kearney.  Simple. Easy. Why can't more people write like that? Why couldn't someone just stick that answer in the dictionary and be done with it? Why spend forty-five minutes reading a two-hundred page novel that has obvious loopholes in the description process?

The sentence above fits poetry perfectly, and explains all poems. Visual poems where shape is important, rhythm poems where beat is important, even free verse where nothing seems to be important all have the key element mentioned above. They all approach language differently. You can even see a clear cut difference, using that sentence, between stories and poems. Stories are somewhat dependent on formula. You can't have a story without conflict. You can't have a story without climax. You probably could have a story without characters, but its so mind-bogglingly hard i use it as a dare for my writing friends. We're still debating what counts as a character.

It doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it does ease my mind to have a clear cut definition. I could almost like poetry now. Almost.

There is no single defining characteristic of poetry, and that has been bothering me of late. Most of the time I don't bother my head about poetry. I write it when I have to, which lately has been in my Creative Writing class. I don't understand it, and not even the dictionary can come up with a simple, direct definition of what a poem is.

You can't say its rhyming anymore. While virtually every poem in "America's Best Loved Poetry" is rhyming, its not necessary for it to be poetry. It doesn't have to have any kind of beat or  rhythm to it. Otherwise free verse and other such forms of poetry would be shunned. You can even pile a whole bunch of words together into a specific shape and call that a 'poem'.

You don't see that anywhere in the short story market, anywhere. A short story is a short story because its a piece of fiction under a certain word limit. Even if you want to get picky, you can say that there are things you can never do in a well written story. Like what? Well, write a story with no conflict in it. Write a story with no characters at all. Alright, so even the sofa can be a character under the right circumstances, but the point is that not even in literary fiction can it work out that there is a characterless story.

I'm not saying not-story-stories don't happen (hopefully by accident) and that worse they don't ever get published, but they're not really stories. They're what I call, literary vomit.

So can someone explain to me what is the defining characteristic that connects all poems together, and lumps them in a group called 'poetry'?

Today was the first day in my entire life that I spent all day doing nothing but writing. I took a shower, fed my horse, and then packed up my laptop and went to the Borders cafe to write. Its a wonder how much work you can get done when there is no internet available to fool around on. I finished a manuscript I'd been dawdling over (and by dawdling I mean I only had a vague idea and no story written at all.) I got another story through the tough phase and well on its way to completion. I edited an already completed manuscript. I even got to work on revamping my 'bio' page in light of my recent publications.

Looking back, I'm really surprised I got that much accomplished. I'm so used to having the internet to slack off on that I've just automatically take that into account when I measure how much I can do in a day.

I'm going to head up to Borders and do the same thing again tomorrow. Hopefully all the effort I'm putting in will pay off and I'll get a few more acceptances for my portfolio. God knows I could use them.

I just finished reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, and that coupled by a discussion in my writing group about immortals made me decide to pose this question. Besides the obvious inability to die, what do you include as typically associated with immortals?

•  Inability to feel pain?

I argued against this one in discussion. I saw a "House" episode about a girl that didn't feel pain, and because of it suffered an enormous amount of trouble. Every time she ran she had to check herself over to make sure she hadn't broken something and simply didn't notice. Maybe it wouldn't matter if you're immortal--but you still might want to know you no longer have an arm before you try to write out a check. I'm just saying its awkward.

• Regeneration when unhealthy?

This might negate the whole 'pain' thing, since if you happen to lop it off it'll just grow back. What about how fast though? Is this an instant gratification sort of thing, or are there limits?

• Fabulously beautiful?

The only exception I can think of off the top of my head when it comes down to unsexy immortals is the vampires in "The Silver Kiss" by Annette Curtis Klause. Other than that they're all pretty much everything we typify as beautiful. I guess the idea of a fat, balding immortal isn't what we want to read about.

What do you all think?

mas·och·ism  /ˈmæsəˌkɪzəm, ˈmæz-/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[mas-uh-kiz-uhm, maz-] 

1.	Psychiatry. the condition in which sexual gratification depends on suffering, physical pain, and humiliation.

2.	gratification gained from pain, deprivation, degradation, etc., inflicted or imposed on oneself, either as a result of one's own actions or the actions of others, esp. the tendency to seek this form of gratification.

3.	the act of turning one's destructive tendencies inward or upon oneself.

4.	the tendency to find pleasure in self-denial, submissiveness, etc.

Yesterday I spent over eight hours bashing my head on my keyboard over a line. That's right, one line of text. One sentence in my story that I didn't like and that I didn't know how to fix. True, I wasn't in physical pain except for my forehead, but the mental anguish was nearly unbearable. I believe somewhere into the seventh hour someone passed by my work station and kindly suggest that I quit.

I looked at him as if he were the lunatic.

Today I got a critique on one of my favorite stories that ripped it to shreds. The critique pointed out every flaw, every plot hole, every overused word, everything. (If she's reading this, she's probably printing it out so she can read mark my overuse of 'every'.) She brutalized my story until it limped back to me wounded and bleeding.

I loved every second of it.

Tomorrow I will probably start receiving the torrent of rejection letters I'm expecting from the submissions I sent out last September. (Its about that time.) Tons of people who looked at my soul, smiled politely, and said 'no thank you.'

I'll probably love that too.

Maybe I'm not a good example of the average writer, but surely I'm not the only one who loves a good critique, a personal rejection letter, or fixing a hard line of text. Does that mean I appreciate the finer points of pain? I don't know. What do you think?

Happy belated New Year everyone! I hope 2008 is shaping into as good a year for you as it is for me. On January 2^nd, I got an email from Sniplits accepting Dragon Psychology. I'm thrilled to be one of their authors, and I can't wait for it to be available to the public. As soon as it is I will post a link for everyone.

Looking back over my posts this last year, I'm amazed at the progress I've made. I've gone from an unpublished author with no plans for the future accept to finish some of the manuscripts I'd started, to a published author with a fairly bright future.

I still use too many adjectives. I still whine about getting rejections. I suppose you can't have everything, right?

I'm hoping this year to top my accomplishments last year however. Since last year I succeeded in meeting, and indeed overshot my publication goal, I have decided to shoot for an even loftier goal this year. Since I am effectively trapped in the role of a fulltime student, I am hoping to try and pay for my move to Washington State in November of this year with my writing.

It's impossible. I am aware of that. I am still going to try. The worst thing that can happen is that I fail. Wish me luck everyone. :)

When I wrote the previous point in this blog, I never intended for it to become a series. There are already enough articles about how hard it is for a submitting author to get published.  My goal was only to point out that getting to the submission part of the publishing process is a success all by itself.  After all, the only writers who will never be published are the ones that never submit.

Still, I got a surprising amount of responses over IM and E-mail, so I thought I'd cover the rest of the problem writers too.  We'll call them, "Almost hopeless" writers.  In the interest of keeping this blog at least a little fresh and different, I will be trying to look at unique aspects of each, even though you can find this same information on every writer's help site that exists.  Let's look at three more writers, shall we?  This time these are all writers who submit their work, but for whatever reason never get accepted.

The Desperate Writer:
This author doesn't just want to be published.  S/he needs to be published.  Why we don't know.  Family pressure? A lack of any other talent? A craving to be loved? Who knows.  It's a desperate, overwhelming and urgent desire that overpowers reason and even good writing.  Sure, s/he finishes the manuscript, and cranks that manuscript out to every publisher, agent, or editor s/he can find the address of.  His/her enthusiasm is unfaulted.  The problem is, s/he does this regardless of whether or not the publisher/agent would fits his/her writing, and often accompanies the manuscript with an obviously desperate cover letter.  Then s/he wonder why s/he got either no responses or a straight set of form rejections.

Please, take a chill pill.

How you present yourself is almost as important as how well you write.  A good cover letter isn't going to sell a bad manuscript, but a bad cover-letter isn't going to help a good manuscript.  You need both.  If you really want to make a good impression, then write a professional cover letter, using standard formatting and plain text.  When you send by mail, include a SASE.  Do not ever send a letter with 'cute' stationary or swirly-wirly (hard to read) text.  This is not going to win you any points with someone who is going to form an impression of you in less than thirty seconds.

If you know your manuscript is good, but don't know how to write a professional cover letter, follow these links:

Novel cover letters:
http://www.sfwa.org/writing/query.htm

Short story cover letters:
http://www.writing-world.com/basics/floyd.shtml

The Deceptive Writer:
This writer probably gets farther than all the other writers, but still falls short of publication.  S/he writes a good manuscript, or good enough really, and then begins to polish what s/he thinks really counts.  S/he spends hours getting every sentence of the query letter and first three chapters of his/her novel right, and then starts sending out.  S/he gets a lot of good responses because s/he sounds very professional.  S/he sends the first three chapters, gets more good reviews, and then sends the rest of the manuscript and is rejected, but with great regret.

Why?

S/he did absolutely nothing with the rest of the novel.  The first three chapters and the query letter are very important, and certainly need a great deal of attention, but you need to give your whole novel that much attention.  You might excite a lot of publishers to begin with, but they're going to be really disappointed when you send in the full manuscript and it's filled with plot holes and spelling errors.  Save yourself the embarrassment and edit the whole thing before sending it out.

The Arrogant Writer:
No one likes to see a whimpering coward downplaying their work in every other sentence of their cover letter, but an arrogant writer is even worse.  This writer seems to think that his/her work is up there with Stephen King's and Dick Francis, and because of this all editors and agents should kneel down and kiss his/her feet for the mere honor of looking at his/her work.  The fact that people like this even exist leaves me speechless.

You're not doing yourself any favors by displaying the fact that you have an ego problem.  That editor is going to admire your manuscript, agree that you are indeed good, and then regretfully reject you because its going to be hell to work with you, and there are plenty of manuscripts just as good with less of an ego problem.


I don't know why it is, but people just seem to lose their minds when trying to become a published author.  Maybe that's a requirement of writing.  I would label myself as a mediocre writer, but 7 out of 8 rejections this year were handwritten with encouragement and critiques.  Part of it may be the writing, but I bet a lot of it comes from being both sensible and polite.  Do try and copy the sensible and polite part when sending your manuscripts out.

Oh. and aj_hyena none of these are you either. :P  Your dialog tag issues drive me crazy, but you're not hopeless.

Hope no one minds if I get this off my chest. There are three writers I know right now who will never make it into print. They are good writers. They have deep plots, a pleasant writing voice, and manuscripts clean enough to eat off of. They have, in my opinion, the writing capability to be the next Stephen King, Tolkien, or whoever it is you like to read. Grieve for them, cause they belong to 'what could have been'.

Writer #1 – Too Picky To Publish
I see this type of person a lot in my critique circle, but chiefly in the works of a couple of friends who I read for pleasure. I like reading them because of the afore mentioned reasons, but also because I can trust them to complete their manuscript and they won't simply abandon me half way through. They're trustworthy in their ability to tell a story the first time, but then the revisions begin, and never stop.

To date I have read two complete novels that are still in the progress of being edited years later. They're still fine-tuning sentences, pouring over paragraphs, and using the 'editing' phase to hide the fact that they're afraid of calling it finished.

As writer's we are always changing and developing, hopefully for the better. By the time you finish writing a book or a story, you will be a better writer. The writing will indeed be better after two or three revisions, but come on, sixteen revisions? Too many. At some point you have to realize that the writing you did before is never going to be as good as the writing you are going to do. At least if you're learning and growing instead of busily developing bad habits. Write a new story, and if people who are not family, or friends enjoy your work—try and publish it. What have you got to lose?

Writer #2 – The Flash In The Pan
I don't see this writer nearly as often as the second type, normally because they don't have anything complete enough to show. The only way to get a look at the writing of this sort of author is to have a peek in their notebook while they're not looking. You'll get treated to an amazing story that has your heart racing and your eyes flying to keep up with the speed of the content—and then it stops, and it never starts again.

This is the worst kind of writing to come across because you spend the rest of your life burning to know what happens, and never getting to know. The author doesn't have the ability, or shall I say will to continue. If you offer to help with a brainstorming session, s/he will limply sit with you, listen to your suggestions, and add them verbatim without so much as changing it to suit the author's voice. The writing will then be dead until s/he gets another flash in the pan, which will also go into the notebook.

You have to admire these writers because they really do need to write like everyone else, and they're willing to write what they see. You have to be disappointed in them because they don't have the drive to force themselves to finish what they started, even if they say they want to. In my opinion, even a crap ending is better than no ending. Get with the program people!


Writer #3 – The Naïve Writer
Every author starts down the written path with some degree of naivety. Writers who fit the bill for #3 start the same as everyone else, but never quite shed that immaturity. The author I have in mind for this category spends an overzealous amount of time editing, but unlike the Too Perfect To Publish author s/he knows when to quit. I have a few of the pieces s/he's written bound up in notebooks somewhere, and I enjoy taking them out to read now and then, even without a red pen.

Unlike the other authors she has complete manuscripts to send out and more importantly does so regularly. She has been rejected every time. Why?

This author has no understanding of the business world whatsoever.

This author sends out his/her works with no cover letter, no SASE, and usually no idea if that particular publisher even accepts unsolicited manuscripts. S/he formats her stories more or less correctly, but never checks the writer's guidelines to see if standard format is what they prefer. S/he's a good writer, but s/he fails to show the publisher that s/he can make them money, and so fails to get accepted if s/he gets a response at all.

Hopefully this author will learn how to write a query letter in the future, and send that to an agent, who can handle the business side of things for him/her. Until then, two of the stories s/he sent me will sit in my reading folder, but never on my shelf. How sad. :(

Nine more days until NaNoWriMo starts once again. Last year I completed NaNo with some success and decided to keep writing all year 'round. Now that NaNo is here again I thought I'd take stock of my progress. Last year I had dozens of started projects and nothing finished. I'd been published but nothing I'd consider using as a publishing credit. I'd never written flash-fiction, or any form of short story, and never found the words to write a full novel.

This year I made the goal of sending out at least two manuscripts every month, and took two months at the beginning of the year to give me time to complete enough projects to do that. With the exception of one month where I only sent out one, and this month where I haven't sent out any, I've kept to that goal. Currently I have 7 stories in consideration right now, 1 published, 4 I pulled out of circulation because they no longer represent my skill level very well, and 2 more almost ready for circulation.

Ok. Enough about my work. Review Time!

This week my best friend and fellow writer gave me Stephen King's "On Writing" to read. It tells how Stephen King got to where he is as a writer, gives tips on writing, and then tells the story about the accident that almost killed him. I enjoyed every page of it, if only because I'm utterly relieved to find a writer who uses the same process I do. I too believe that the stories I write are already written, and that I'm just the one discovering it. His description of how he thinks stories are created matches my thoughts exactly. It's kind of scary, actually. He also showed a sample page of editing and that too relieved me. I guess no matter where you are in life, writing is the same.

If you get a chance, read the book. You won't regret it.

Not much to report on since my last journal entry.  There's been a void of silence on the publisher end of things, and while I've maintained my goal of completing two new manuscripts per month, I'm not satisfied with the endings of the ones I've been writing recently.  I want to improve the quality of my work, and right now I just don't think what I have is a good example of my current skill level.


I haven't seen any stories that took my breath away in the reviewing department either, so instead of posting another review, today shall be link day.  A few weeks ago I promised I'd dig up my link on contract terms, and while looking it up again I found this rather amusing glossary:

http://www.rightreading.com/publishing/publishing-glossary.htm


The article I meant to post up here was actually this one:


http://www.writing-world.com/rights/copyright.shtml


It explains publishing rights rather nicely, which is important if you want to be a serious writer.  After all, it'd be awful if you meant to write a series and signed away all your rights to the characters.  Reading this article made me aware of what to look for, and since then I read all contracts very carefully.  I'd rather say no to a possible contract than regret losing a great story forever.  There's also another article linked in the one above that goes into 'all rights' more in-depth.


Anyway, just posting to let y'all know I'm still alive and kicking.  There's just nothing to report, so I'll keep this post short and sweet.

I read an article somewhere that said the average manuscript is rejected twelve times before someone bothers to accept. I've sent out ten unique manuscripts, and gotten five rejections, four in absolute silence---and one acceptance!! A few days ago I got a cash offer for an article I wrote on how to clean a horse stall (humorous) and today it was published! I got about enough cash to go to starbucks with a friend, and royalties for every thousand unique page views. Anyway, it's free to go look so:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/368456/tips_for_cleaning_a_dirty_horse_stall.html

Woohoo!

Aaaw,
isn't he so cute?  I decided since continually whining about rejection slips bores me, and not mentioning them at all casts the art of getting published in too rosey a light, to strike a happy medium.  Everyone, please meet Reco, my rejection penguin.  Every time I get a rejection, I'll put up a Reco comic, because bad news from a penguin is so much easier than bad news from a boring old blog.  Plus, it'll give me more room for fun things like reviews, and helpful links to other writing sites.

Speaking of, I stumbled over a blog featuring mental illnesses yesterday.  The fact that it captures the day to day difficulties of mental illness intrigued me, and if I do say so myself it's a gold mine for writers.  Therefore, the helpful link of the day is:


http://mental-health.families.com/blog/

Nothing new to report writing wise.  I'm editing the experimental story mentioned a few posts ago after getting some good advice from Critique Circle.  I do find it amusing that people are willing to accept trouble in customs as a logical part of the story, but won't accept the idea of internet access.  All a good thing really, since I now know what era I'm trying to write from, and neither existed at the time.  Go figure.

I sent out another story the other day, although I doubt they will accept.  They had two options for what you can offer, exclusive universal rights, or limited rights.  I chose limited.  I don't like the idea of never having any control over my story again, and never being able to sell the work again should I wish to.  Writing is hard enough as it is, it shouldn't be made harder through sneaky advertising.  Somewhere I have a website that translates the lingo in all that paperwork so you actually know what they're saying.  If I find it, I'll post it next time.

If you're tired of reading a mediocre selection of short stories when your favorite literary magazine arrives, I suggest you switch to Summerset Review. I found this ezine while researching places to submit my own work, and now have it safely stashed in my personal reading folder. In particular I'd like to draw attention to a story available in their summer 07 addition: Moon, June, Raccoon.

This story is by Renee Carter Hall, a short story writer that, according to a search on google, is better known for her poetry. The story is about a lonely woman who, in desperation to find love, tries a New Age spell to rectify the situation. Instead of a man knocking on her door however, she finds none other than a raccoon named Kris. I won't spoil the ending for you. You'll have to go read it yourself.

A warning to other short story writers however: Her work might make you envious.

Enough props. The link to her story is here:
http://www.summersetreview.org/07summer/moon.htm

Go read it!

Another rejection slip came in the mail! At this rate, I'm going to win the Great Rejection Slip Contest for sure. That makes four for this month alone. It wouldn't be so bad except I'm not quite sure what I'm doing wrong. Three out of four rejection letters were handwritten. Two gave assurances that it was a 'very nice read'. Reviews from my critique circle are good. Family doesn't count, they'd love burnt toast if you handed it to them.

I'm glad my stories are a good read, and that editor's are striving to let me know my work is good. What I'd rather know is what I'm doing wrong, or, if it's just the wrong magazine, who is the right one? My stories don't exactly fit into stereotypes. I can't say for sure, "this is the right magazine for me." Maybe I'm just writing the wrong stuff, or shooting too high in the magazines I choose.

Anyway, no other writing news to report. I'm still sending stuff out, writing new stories, honing my craft, and helping others sharpen their work too. If you want a short story or novel looked at, post a comment here and I'll get right to it.

When we last hear from our bold hero...
Ok fine. I'm not bold, and I'm not a hero either, but things have improved by leaps and bounds since my last note. I felt so bad about upsetting my last editor, I sent her a little apology card in the mail. Then I spent the past four or so days bashing my head on the desk because I figured she'd be angry over me dragging the subject up again. Luckily, she reacted just the way I would.

I got an email today saying these things happen and I am completely, 100%, in every way, forgiven! That makes me feel a lot better because I'd hate to leave an impression on the literary world of a rude and thoughtless person.

Hopefully my good luck will continue and I'll get an acceptance!