So, what happens when you send a manuscript to a pro market like Analog or Asimov’s or Cemetery Dance or Weird Tales and they accept it? Do you get a phone call? An email? A letter? A telegram? A smoke signal? At the moment I’m feeling discouraged and I feel like I just might never know from personal experience.

Sometimes I think that there’s something wrong with me and my enjoyment of certain geek shows, especially with they way I continue to enjoy them long after the rest of the geek world has pronounced them crap. For example: I enjoyed seasons five through seven of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, even though geek conventional wisdom holds that those seasons were pretty weak. I also continue to enjoy Lost. I also enjoyed Season 2 of Heroes, even though most people thought the second season sucked. And despite the criticisms of the first half of Season Four of Battlestar Galactica, I thought that was quite adequate as well.

I have this theory that the geek community’s expectations for a show continue to rise, whether or not the quality of that show rises in response to it. So if a show’s quality is constant, or even if it improves a small amount, if geek expectations rise higher than the show’s quality does, the geeks will proclaim that the show has decreased in quality. From what I can tell, my theory holds true of Season Three of Heroes. I haven’t seen the season premiere yet, so I don’t know personally, but I suspect I’m right.