April 2005

From the rejec­tion letter:

Thank you for sub­mit­ting “Out­side, Look­ing In” to Strange Hori­zons, but we’ve decid­ed not to accept it for pub­li­ca­tion. This is an intrigu­ing and poet­i­cal­ly writ­ten piece; we all liked it (I felt the sto­ry real­ly hit its stride at the point when the pro­tag­o­nist showed up on Earth). But over­all it did­n’t real­ly hold togeth­er for us.

At least they liked it enough to give me pos­i­tive feed­back, and not a “Please quit send­ing us stuff” let­ter like Snoopy always seems to get.

On to the next one. F&SF, probably.

lat­er
Or maybe ASF, or some­thing along those lines. I was think­ing of a dif­fer­ent sto­ry, one that’s more def­i­nite­ly on the Fan­ta­sy side of the cur­tain (“Fim­bul­vetr”, if you’re interested).

So now I have the list of scenes / chap­ters (87 in total — appar­ent­ly part I has the most chap­ters in it…), and now I get to write the “scene expan­sion”. Then the first draft.

Lookin’ for­ward to it. And I’m still excit­ed by this sto­ry, which is a good sign, I think.

Work­ing on Part 8, the spread­sheet view of the sto­ry, chap­ter by chap­ter or maybe scene by scene. I did Part I tonight, and I wound up with 46 chapter/scenes in total. Some will be short; oth­ers will be longer.

So this is my blog. Pret­ty damn bor­ing, eh?