The first story of my modern era, “The Ancient Bridge”, was accepted by Sams Dot Publishing and will be published October 2010 in Beyond Centauri, a YA Science Fiction & Fantasy quarterly. It’s a coming of age story with swords, lost causes, and bandits.

Hypersonic Tales, the e-zine that has accepted “Service”, is running a little behind. I’m getting antsy to see it out there.

“Alchemy” is out. “DIY” is past the average response time for the market, which could be good, or it could just be the holidays. Got an almost on “An Advance on Junior”.

I’m tinkering with the ending of “Advance” and trying to decide where to send it. I guess I should send it to the other top markets that move relatively quickly, just to make sure, and then work towards a more likely market. My skin is getting increasingly thick and the rejections are less daunting, but it’s the lost time that is frustrating now.

I think the convention of no simultaneous submissions shows just how much the field has enormous supply and minimal demand. It’s a pain as a writer. Of course, if simultaneous submissions were the norm in this modern age of electronic submission, then we’d all just e-mail/post all our stories to all the top markets at the same time and they’d be swamped all the time. And it would be up to the writers to tell markets to withdraw an accepted work. Oh yes, we’d all do that. As much as I enjoy a little chaos, it really does make sense. Oh well.