Long, Long Overdue

But incredibly late is still better than never, right?

I’m back from England, and I have Various News.

On the Rabbit and Cougar front, my queries to agents have mostly been rejected (with the others joining the category of unanswered-long-enough-to-likely-remain-unanswered-in-perpetuity). I have thus taken my new edit of the manuscript to the next step: submission to DAW Books. This has been my theoretical fallback for years: DAW is a respectable publisher of sci-fi and fantasy and takes unsolicited, unagented manuscripts. I’d never submitted anything there before because they require that the submission be exclusive to them, and I thought that their estimated consideration time was a year (it’s actually more like three months). I didn’t want to tie up a manuscript for a year, but I have now queried Rabbit and Cougar to agencies in both the USA and the UK, so I’m okay with letting DAW have exclusive consideration while I work on other things.

I got my applications in for all eleven graduate schools . . . and have thus far been rejected by ten of them. MFAs in Creative Writing are competitive at the best of times, and the economy is sending a lot of people back to school right now. Still, I have to admit I’ve been surprised. I’m hopeful about the last school, North Carolina State.

In other sad news, possibly related to the bummer economy, the magazine Reynard’s Menagerie, which published my short story “This, That, and Th’Other,” is shutting down. The issue after mine is their last issue.

The Dogwatchers is going well, and I have plans for a rewrite of one of the short stories I did for Professor Robbins’ class. This month, I plan to attend RavenCon and also the James River Writers Writing Show.