Not much to report writing-wise.  I haven’t actually written much in STSM since last week; I’ve been a little busy.  However, there has been some movement on the short story front.

First, I got an email from Blood, Blade and Thruster.  They returned my manuscript unopened and unread because that particular market is folding.  This is disappointing; I enjoyed what little of theirs I saw.  Their website will remain live, though, and they’ll be putting together some anthologies, so I guess that’s something. But now "Night of the Frozen Elf" is free to fling off at other markets.

Second, I got an email from the editor of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, letting me know that they’ve decided to include an illustration with "A Most Heinous Man".  Wahoo!  This is the first time a published story of mine has been illustrated (though Sorcery and Science did include a photograph of a donkey with "The Unrevealed Tort, Revealed", which was oddly appropriate).  The artist, Lewis Morley of Australia, says that he’s interested in doing a sort of Universal Horror movie poster, which is exactly the sort of imagery I had in mind when I wrote the story.  He’ll also be including several names in the "credits" part of the image, and the editor suggested that I offer up a few possible names to include.  I wrote back with three names.  If you know me well, you probably know what those names are.

So this is pretty happy news to get after Monday’s rejection letter.

In other news, thanks to my friend Dale, I have some good ideas for rewrites on "Just Like This".  And on "Burying Uncle Albert".  And possibly on "Night of the Frozen Elf", though I think my biggest challenge for that one will be hacking out 1,000 words so I can make it more marketable.  Seems like most markets only want stories of 5,000 words or less.

Oh, and Daikaijuzine 3.0 (Gamera) goes like on Friday.  In what may be a first for us (and may cause a few coronaries world wide), it looks like we’re pretty much all done with this one.  The stories are all entered into the database, the managing editor has read them all over and made corrections, all contracts are signed and in my mailbox.  All I have to do is go into each one, click "Publish", and then make the Table of Contents page (which I’ve already created) live.  It’s the work of five minutes.  Usually I’m pulling things all together at the last minute, and delaying publication until 6:00 p.m. to give me enough time to finalize everything.  But everything’s finalized and ready to go.

Anyway.  Back to work for me.