Writerly Wackiness

Happy news for the road

2008-07-17T14:45:11Z

I received my first-ever unsolicited reprint offer yesterday. The Writer's Institute, Inc. would like to include my story "Love Spells" (originally published in Leading Edge) in a teaching anthology called Voices, which will be used as a component of one of their writing courses. I did my homework and everything looks shiny, so here's a yay! to my fiction being used to corrupt--er, I mean, teach and inspire--beginning writers.

In other news, I'll be heading off to TNEO tomorrow morning. Wacky road trip antics with rogue_psion will ensue. And all 07 Odfellows attending should beware, for I may just bring the chicken chucker.

Free at last! Free at last!

2008-07-08T19:31:09Z

In other words, I just finished the last of my TNEO crits today. As of mid-June, I only had two left to go, but between the time spent on the previous TNEO stories and the critting I have to do for my in-person writing group every other week, I kept putting those two off because I was so darn sick of critiquing. Every time I picked up a story, I was overcome with an insanely strong compulsion to check my email and tidy up my office files and add music to iTunes and work on my own stories and make to-do lists.

Amazingly, I didn't delve into LJ very much for diversion. In fact, I've been a little neglectful. I've been reading my friends list posts, but only occasionally chiming in. So in case you've been losing sleep over it, I am still alive. Doesn't feel like it sometimes, though. I think I require more caffeine.

Oh, and back to the subject of critiques and writing groups and the like, a big old thank you to squirrel_monkey for her visit to our humble little Philly group last weekend. It made for an awesomely writerly afternoon.

In other news, I am officially a Mac convert now. My shiny new Macbook arrived last week, and I love it. I still have a PC as my desktop (I wasn't planning to get a new laptop until my old one started crapping out on me), but when that puppy starts to die, it's getting replaced with a Mac.

I've also got my TNEO lecture all ready to go. I think it'll be fun. There are entirely too many awesome scenes I could use for the exercises I'll have folks doing, though, which made it hard to choose a few that would fit into the allotted time. But choose I did.

Anyway, now that I've gotten all that down, it's back to critiquing non-TNEO stuff. And then *gasp* doing a little of my own writing.

A quick moment of pimpage

2008-07-01T21:07:57Z

A reprint of my short story "Jarra" is now up in the current issue of The Lorelei Signal. There's a poll for favorite story in the issue, so if the spirit moves you, any votes cast my way will be much appreciated.

I'm feeling incredibly unfocused and scattered today, so I'm going to leave off with that as any further blogging would likely result in an incomprehensible, headache-inducing entry.

Got Air?

2008-06-23T21:45:43Z

My laptop has gone from frustrating me with its increasingly more frequent moments of excruciating slowness (I should not be able to go upstairs and make a sandwich in less time than it takes Word to open, especially when no other programs are running) to beginning its death throes. The infamous Blue Screen of Death even put in an appearance last week.

Having gotten progressively disillusioned with the world of PCs, I've spent the past several months saying "I am so getting a Mac next time," and I meant it. I was planning to get a regular old MacBook to replace my current laptop, but then I started checking out the MacBook Air, and my geeky little heart did leaps of joy. There are many things about Air that make me happy. It is a bit more expensive, though, and there are some downsides, like no built-in ethernet for those times when Wi-Fi isn't an option. And there's no DVD drive for watching movies. Granted, I can count on one hand, maybe two, the number of DVDs I've watched on my laptop in the three years I've owned it, but when watching a DVD is what you want to do, it's nice to be able to, oh, do it. And apparently you you need to purchase the additional physical CD/DVD drive if you want to run Windows through the Boot Camp feature, which is something I'd like to be able to do.

OK, I was going to ask for opinions or any personal experience you all might have, but after typing all that out, I think I may have successfully talked myself out of the oh-so-light-and-shiny MacBook Air and back to my original plan.

The productivity stick returns!

2008-06-17T03:33:27Z

See LJ? A little bit of space, and I managed to catch up. Now I'm just normal-busy instead of crazy-busy.

For the first day in months, I can say that, as of earlier this afternoon, I have absolutely nothing to critique. (At least nothing with a deadline. I can always find something to crit somewhere.) It feels wonderful. The round 3 TNEO stories could turn up at any moment now, perhaps even as I'm posting this, but for this brief shining moment, I am all caught up.

I finished my round 3 TNEO story ("A Song Never Tasted") a few days before deadline, which was good since it gave me time to set the story aside for a few days so that I could then tackle the info-dump weighing down my first couple of pages with fresher eyes. It may still be a bit dumpy in spots, but it's certainly better than it was.

And I finally returned the novel revisions yesterday. I started the revisions several months ago, but I couldn't get past the first damn paragraph, so I set it aside and focused on cranking out short stories for TNEO. But on my train ride home from Philly last night, after several hours of nerding out with my writing group, I pulled out the novel opening, something clicked, and voila! A beginning I can move on from. I was quite ecstatic about that.

And I have entirely too many short stories ideas clamoring for attention right now. I think I may have to go with the zombie story idea shvetufae and Mary gave me on Saturday. Because the zombie idea rocks, as do friends who will discuss zombies with you for hours on end.

I hath been meme tagged!

2008-06-17T02:43:50Z

Since ellen_denham tagged me and I actually have time to do something other than breathe and critique, my mission is to pick up any old book, go to page 123, and blog the fifth line.

*runs to bookshelf and grabs something*

Ok, I have here Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, and the fifth sentence on pg 123 is:

Blood was on the beak of this one and white feathers stuck to the claws of another, and no gull skimmed beyond them over the pallid sea.

Bloody seagulls.

Time to close my eyes, point my finger at my friends list, and choose my five tagging victims at random. Ok, rcloenen_ruiz, marshall_payne, rogue_psion, ckastens, and kristajhl, consider yourselves thusly tagged...and free to ignore said tagging. :)

Lemurs on a dirigible

2008-06-08T04:03:51Z

Just wanted to sneak in a quick little LJ post to say that my story "A Red One Cannot See" (or, as I've more frequently referred to it, my lemur-on-a-dirigible story) was accepted for Shimmer's Clockwork Jungle Book issue. That was a very nice email to find in my inbox this morning. Yay little lemur!

And on the subject of a red that one can see, sunburn sucks. I got to listen to some great music at the Appel Farm Arts & Music Festival today, but it was ungodly hot, and I was sweating off the suntan lotion faster than I could re-apply it. Damn my ghostly pale skin.

On that note, it's time to get to bed so I can rest up for another day of resisting the lure of the internet and getting some work done. I'm about halfway through the round 2 TNEO crits and halfway through turning the crappy first draft of my round 3 TNEO story into a not-so-crappy second draft.

Magazines, productivity, and other shiny things

2008-05-23T17:32:19Z

Today's mail brought with it my shiny new copy of the print version of The Sword Review #27, which has my story "The Poet" in it. And I get to share the TOC with marshall_payne and other shiny people, which brings additional coolness.

On the productivity front, I finally started making a dent in my round 1 TNEO crits. It's a small dent, but a dent all the same. I'm determined to get through the rest of the round 1 stories this weekend, after which I'll try to do a crit a day on the round 2 stories in the hopes that I'll be done with those by the time we receive the round 3 stories.

And the story I'll be submitting for round 3 is coming along. It's been slow-going, but the writing's picking up steam . . . in both the momentum sense and the my-characters-need-to-get-a-room sense.

That said, it's time to kick back on the papasan in the sunroom, enjoy today's gorgeous weather, get some more crits done, and clock in some more writing time.

The lack of productivity is strong with this one

2008-05-13T21:02:28Z

I was doing so well while working on my last story, but then I finished it and promptly went back to being useless in the writerly productivity department. On the plus side, out of all the ideas and story fragments on my computer screaming "Ooo, me! Pick me!", I had a very nice conversation with one Friday night, and I think we made a connection. I had to reschedule our first date a few times due to those pesky real life issues getting in the way, but tonight we're going to sit down and chat over some iced lattes. I'll hold the door and pay for the drinks; the story will provide stimulating conversation, and if I'm lucky, perhaps some inspiration for a dramatic tale of lust and bloodshed.

Speaking of tales of lust and bloodshed, according to vash137, my revision of the orgy story has officially achieved "the exact right ratio of vomiting to sex." It is a proud day.

On another writing note, I wrote a 300-word flash story a while back which involved an anthropomorphized English language getting all battered and abused by a whiny internet user. I sent it a few places, and while one market liked the writing and imagery, they thought the story wouldn't speak to the casual reader the same way it would to the writing community. Point well taken, so I thought perhaps the ideal market would be one where writers are the target audience. With that in mind, I shipped the story off to The VERB, an e-zine for writers (for the life of me, I can't remember where I stumbled across it), and yesterday got an e-mail that they'd like to buy it for their October 2008 issue. So yay for my little writerly flash story.

What the story wants, the story gets

2008-05-01T22:18:30Z

And the tense-hopper is done, a whole two weeks before the next TNEO deadline. That feels good. I have to admit to tearing up a little while writing the ending, and then again today while editing the ending. If I can make someone else cry with this story, I will consider my mission complete--that is, of course, as long as they are shedding "oh, that was so sad and touching" tears and not "I weep in joy because this crap is finally over" tears.

Even though it took switching everything to present tense to put an end to the brain-hurting tense hopping, I really thought I was going to end up changing this story back to past tense once I got through the first draft. But that little bugger got really stubborn when I tried to switch it back, and I know better than to argue with a story when it sets its mind on something. So present tense it is.

And on that note, it's time to troll my files for another story to work on. Hmm, here's one I started in present tense...

The Unknown Danger at Home: Falling Skeletons

2008-04-30T23:08:36Z

Just when I think my daily horoscope has exhausted its (unintentional) entertainment value, I read this gem:

"Skeletons literally might fall out of your closet!"

Really? Actual skeletons might come tumbling out when I open the door? Perhaps AsYouKnowBob has taken up a questionable new hobby and is storing the evidence in the closet. We'll have to have a talk. I was taught never to stash the dead bodies at home.

Once again, I flash my assets

2008-04-25T20:29:21Z

As some folks already know from me babbling elsewhere, I queried Hub on a submission earlier this week and received a lovely reply that they'd like to publish "To Someone Who Needs Prayer." Yay-ness! Currently awaiting the contract and what issue it will be in, but I will be sure to shamelessly plug when the time comes.

I think the story was up to about 1,600 words when I had it critiqued at Odyssey. A few folks suggested the story would work better as a flash piece (I believe I owe props to ericjamesstone and todd_vandy for that, possibly others), and I had to agree. So after making some story-level revisions, I focused on getting it down to 1,000 words, which turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. But after many head-meets-desk moments, I did it. Well, if you want to be really picky about things, it ended up being about 20-something words over 1,000. Close enough for grenades and rounded-to-the-nearest-hundred submission word counts.

In the writerly progress department, things have been going well. There have been distractions aplenty this week (like taking on layout duty for a newsletter I normally only have to do the content editing on), and this weekend will be full of musical craziness (dress rehearsal tonight, concert tomorrow night, and yet more solo and choir singing on Sunday morning), but when I have sat down to write, the productivity has been a-flowing. I'm hoping I can finish and polish up the first draft of the short story I've been working on--the one with the unintentional and previously blogged about tense hopping, which is tentatively borrowing its title from an Emily Dickinson poem, "Nobody knows this little Rose."

I've already slacked on dedicating Tuesday nights to the novel revision, though. A few weeks ago, I spent my Tuesday night writing time with shvetufae, vash137, and crew revising the orgy story. The Tuesday after that, I skipped out on the journey into Philly and fiddled with the tense-hopping story, but mostly slacked since the Sinus Headache from Hell kept coming and going all night. And this past Tuesday, I was in such a groove on the tense-hopper that I just kept going.

So on the bad side, my dedication to novel revisions is rubbish. On the good side, at least I'm slacking in favor of short story writing instead of DVDs and Mythbusters.

Multiple Tense Disorder

2008-04-16T19:48:51Z

Yesterday was a new one for me in the writing department. I started work on a new story and was happily writing away in past tense when all the sudden, about a few hundred words into the piece, I realized I had switched to present tense. I figured, "what the heck, it's a crappy first draft that can be fixed later" and kept going. Next thing I knew, I had switched from present to past and back again over the course of only a few sentences. That's when it started to hurt my brain. So despite my desire to just plow through the rough draft, I went back, read over what I had written, and decided the story really wanted to be in present tense. And once I changed all the past stuff to present, the writing proceeded without anymore tense hiccups.

I've changed a story's tense after finishing a draft and evaluating the story as a whole, but this is the first time I've found myself switching midstream while writing. Weird.

Productivity...check

2008-04-14T03:43:12Z

So much for going to bed early tonight like I had planned. Oops.

Anyway, I finally got my writing groove back on this past week and finished my story revisions in plenty of time for the first TNEO deadline. I feel better now. For you '07ers who critiqued the original version last summer at Odyssey, the story in question would be the one I've come to lovingly refer to as "the orgy story." Its actual title, however, is "The Sun's Rebirth" (changed from the boring and generic "Legacy" title I originally gave it). I was amazed by just how much stuff in the first draft didn't need to be there. It started out at 6,100 words; now it's about 3,800.

Now I need to figure out what to work on next. Something new, or another revision? Or the revision that will essentially be something new because I'm going to rewrite it from a completely different POV? Will have to look through what's waiting in the wings and see which one goes "Ooo, me! Pick me!" the loudest.

That wacky writing thing. Guess I should blog about it or something.

2008-04-03T20:37:22Z

We'll start with the positive. "Lucky Clover" received some nice comments over yonder: A Mystery That Reads

I got myself all signed up for TNEO this summer. For you non-Odfellows out there, that would be the The Never-Ending Odyssey, a week-long workshop during the summer for Odyssey grads. Doing the short story track, though I may throw in a novel chapter as one of my submissions. The option's there, and it's quite likely that I'll, oh, actually have a chapter fit for human eyes ready by the last submission deadline.

Speaking of, the novel de-suckification process has officially begun. Woo hoo! Tuesday nights have become Revise That Damn Novel Night. Short stories will have to clamor for attention during the rest of the week. Starting the revisions was painful. The first chapter originally opened with a prophecy being delivered. Part of the de-suckification process involves removing said prophecy from the novel. Translation: entirely new opening scene needed. I came up with this wonderful new opening sentence two weeks ago, then promptly got stuck. But this week I finally banged my head against the wall hard enough to knock some bricks loose and squirm through.

On the short story writing front, I've been utterly useless lately, and my excuses for that uselessness all suck. Other than the week or so during which my lemur-on-a-dirigible story came pouring forth, my productivity has been pretty darn pathetic. Occasional small bursts of achievement here and there, but mostly lots of swearing, teeth gnashing, and rewriting the same sentence over and over again before finally falling prey to the lure of my DVD collection and reruns of Mythbusters.

At least now I have a motivator for whipping my current story into shape: fear. The April 12 deadline for my first TNEO submission is looming awful close. So on that note, I am off to laugh in the face of distraction and achieve productivity.

Break out the green beer!

2008-03-15T16:56:30Z

It's almost St. Patrick's Day, so to help celebrate, I offer you leprechauns, clovers, blood, and some nasty-looking fairies. In other words, "Lucky Clover" is now up at Flash Fiction Online, accompanied by some damn cool artwork by inarticulate1. So grab yourself a green beer or two, and enjoy!

A Time To ...

2008-03-08T22:49:59Z

First, the obligatory plug: A Time To ... Volume 2 - The Best of The Lorelei Signal 2007, which includes my short story "Second Moon" (the artwork by Lee Kuruganti that accompanied the story's original publication also graces the anthology's cover, and I think it's darn perty), is now available for purchase through Lulu as a trade paperback or PDF download. It should also be available through Amazon and Mobipocket in the near future, so stay tuned if those are your preferred cup of purchasing tea. Because you are going to buy a copy, right? Right?

And so this blog doesn't turn into a constant barrage of me shamelessly plugging stuff, I should probably do something non-plug-like. So, um, yeah ... I don't got much right now. I haven't been particularly productive on the writing front lately, though not for lack of effort. My internal editor has been holding my brain hostage, and I haven't been able to get past the blockade she set up partway through the story I'm trying to revise. But I've got the SWAT team assembled now, and they're going in.

A quick yet shameless plug

2008-03-01T22:26:46Z

My flash story "Soul Delivery" is now up in the Spring 2008 issue of Flashquake. And it comes complete with a nice introductory comment from Sharon Hurlbut, who selected the story as her Editor's Pick for the issue:

"Delightful twist on the old tale of a man selling his soul to the devil. Excellent pacing and writing."

And now that I'm done with the plugging, I should get back to doing some more of that wacky writing thing.

I'll take more Mondays like this

2008-02-25T21:07:58Z

Woke up to find a reprint acceptance in my inbox this morning, which was a nice way to start the day. My short story "Jarra" was accepted for the July-September 2008 issue of The Lorelei Signal (my second sale to them). The story was originally published in the now-defunct Forgotten Worlds, with whom I had a not-so-pleasant experience, so it's nice to see the story get another home.

Also got a phone call for a job interview next week, so fingers crossed for my possible return to the world of full-time employment. I seem to manage my free time better when I have less of it, train rides into Philly are great for getting done all the reading I haven't been doing lately, and it would give me a good reason to stop over-volunteering my time elsewhere.

Debating whether I'll be joining my fellow Odfellows for TNEO this summer. I'd really like to, but I have no idea what my work situation is going to be like by then. Still got about a month to decide, at least.

Of flashing, lemurs, and vocalizing

2008-02-25T01:36:46Z

2008 is being nice to my flash fiction so far. I found out today that a silly little story of mine called "Soul Delivery" is going to be an Editor's Pick in the Spring 2008 issue of Flashquake, which will go online March 1. I will be sure to shamelessly plug it some more when the time comes.

On the productivity front, I polished up my lemur-on-a-dirigible story yesterday and got it shipped off to Shimmer's Clockwork Jungle issue. It was fun tackling steampunk for the first time, and I think the story came out with a different feel than my usual stuff, which was part of the fun. That, and lemurs are cool, as are dirigibles. If the story doesn't have anything else going for it, it at least has lemurs on a dirigible.

And in the non-writing world, the chorus I sing with had its annual Solo Artists Showcase concert today. I sang a solo (a Gabriel Faure piece called "Mai") and a duet with As You Know Bob ("No One Is Alone" from Into the Woods). I had to sing first on the program, which is always nerve-racking, but things went well overall, so yay.

Hey, something resembling productivity!

2008-02-18T01:26:03Z

Crappy first draft of the lemur-on-a-dirigible story: done! Now to turn it into a not-so-crappy second draft...

And I got a phone call Friday night that I've been honorably mentioned in the Writers of the Future first quarter for 2008. Admittedly, my over-ambitious self had higher hopes for the story I sent, but hey, an honorable mention brings no shame.

Desperately in need of beating with the produtivity stick

2008-02-09T21:23:48Z

I have no excuse to be as unproductive as I've been lately. I'm rubbish.

Other than two flash stories and a few beginnings to some stories I plan to finish in the near future, I've mostly been revising older stuff lately. I still have a few more revisions to tackle, but I'm taking a break to focus on a new story I want to finish in time to submit to Shimmer's The Clockwork Jungle Book issue. This is my first attempt at writing steampunk--not to mention my first attempt at writing about a lemur on a dirigible. I know, I know, the lemur-on-a-dirigible genre is becoming overcrowded these days...

In the shameless plug department, my short story "Love Spells," which originally appeared in issue 53 of Leading Edge, is now available on the nifty new AnthologyBuilder, where you can create your own custom anthology from the previously published works they have listed. Or you can use one of the ready-made anthologies in their library (I'm honored to have been included in one put together by Odyssey comrade
ericjamesstone). I'm hoping to add a couple more stories to AnthologyBuilder sometime soon.

And one more shameless plug for the road: Flash Fiction Online's lineup for March. If you follow the link, I recommend checking out the stories while you're there. Good stuff worth supporting.

In the meantime, maybe I should be polishing my haiku instead of worrying about the lemur on the dirigible...

And the Captain Obvious award goes to...

2008-02-04T17:39:01Z

I enjoy mocking the daily horoscopes in the newspaper. They usually read as if they were written with magnetic poetry. But I don't know if they're ever going to be able to top this gem from today:

The unexpected will occur when you least expect it.

Get out!

Dude, where's my free time?

2008-01-11T22:46:48Z

When it comes to finding time to sit my butt down long enough to do some decent work in the writing department, 2008 hasn't been so hot thus far. Too many other things going on, most of them stupid little annoyances. Like my internet service--or frequent lack thereof. When my DSL connection hasn't been randomly cutting out, it's been achieving dial-up levels of slowness--despite multiple technician visits and insistences from customer service that everything's all fixed now. My work-from-home job requires me to download very large files that can take up to 30 minutes to download when my connection is working at normal speed, so this slow-to-nonexistent connection just ain't cutting it. Current ISP is being ditched for a new one that cannot be installed soon enough.

So anyway, I've squeezed in little bursts of writing or revision here and there, but that's just not a highly productive way to work. But in the non-writing parts of Writer Land, it's been a good week.

On Wednesday, I got an acceptance from the small press 'zine Kaleidotrope for a flash piece of mine called "Efficiency" (one of my few stories that doesn't really fall into the speculative fiction camp)

Locus reviewer Rich Horton has been doing some year-end summaries of various markets on his Livejournal (

ecbatan), which is worth checking out for a good overview of what some mags have published this past year. Yesterday I was happy to see that my story "To Worship Death" got a positive mention in his summary of Fictitious Force:

"Amid a selection of stories I really liked throughout (only one was marked 'So-So' in my notes) the others that stood out were 'Tangerine Bay' by David McGillveray and 'To Worship Death' by B. A. Barnett."

And yesterday Flash Fiction Online, a fairly new e-zine paying pro rates for flash fiction, decided that they're going to buy my flash story "Lucky Clover" for a St. Patrick's Day special. Woot! On an amusing note, this would be the flash story I referenced in my last entry--the one that got the "should be much shorter" comment from another market. Guess I won't have to start submitting it in haiku form after all.

And for any of you '07 Odfellows reading this, the wacky bloodstained clover leprechaun fest that I wrote at Odyssey (then called "Family Luck," now called "Unlucky Clover") is actually a sequel of sorts to "Lucky Clover," which features Seamus, the father of the protag from my Odyssey story, in action during the Fairy Wars. You should all be pleased to know that there is a clover, and there is blood.

The Yearly Writerly Recap

2008-01-03T17:56:35Z

It's that time of year again when I hop on my blog to procrastinate by telling you what I achieved on the 2007 writerly front during the moments when I wasn't procrastinating.

Odyssey. Back in January 2007, I figured if I was ever going to do an intensive workshop like Odyssey, this was the opportune time to do it. So as much as it scared me, I applied. And much to my surprise, I was accepted. Most people who read this blog have heard me babble enough to know that it was one of the best things I ever did. (Or you were there with me, in which case I have only one thing to say: bo-keerk!) I'd like to think I'm a better writer as a result; I'm definitely a better critiquer, at least. And I also learned useful things about bloodstained clovers and the evil ways of chickens.

Novels. Sometime in the spring, I was about halfway through a first draft of novel #2 when I officially put it on hold. I've been brainstorming a major rewrite (and title change) for novel #1, which I will hopefully get started on sometime this year.

Short Stories. Wrote 12 new short stories this year (4 of which were flash pieces). That's about half as many as last year, but that makes sense since I dedicated a huge chunk of 2007 to revising existing stories instead of cranking out new ones. My post-Odyssey goal in the short story department was to "revise everything I've ever written." A bit of an exaggeration since some of what I've written is derivative tripe that shall never again see the light of day, and rightfully so. But I did get most of the as-yet-unpublished stuff that doesn't completely suck revised.

On the short story submission front: ridiculously large number of submissions, ridiculously large number of rejections. But that's to be expected since (a) I'm not brilliant, and (b) I changed my submission strategy this year. At Odyssey, George Scithers advised us to pattern submissions to maximize income, not to minimize rejection. And minimizing rejection was exactly what I had fallen into doing. I aimed for the middle of the road where I knew I'd have an easier time of success, with only the occasional sub to a pro market, telling myself those markets weren't worth the postage or the wait time since they were just going to reject me anyway. Take gun, aim at foot.

So now my strategy is this (and now that I type it out, it's kind of a "duh, why weren't you doing this before, you moron"): when a story's polished and ready to go, I make a list of what markets it might be appropriate for, and then I aim at the top and work my way down. It's slower going since some places have longish response times and I have more stories than there are markets at the top of the list, which means a story will sometimes have to sit on the bench for a bit because the next market I want to send it to already has another story of mine. It's hard for me to be patient and resist the "must...submit...now!" urge, but I'm doing it. Because beyond writing the best stories I can, the only way to crack the markets I want to be published in is to, oh, actually submit my best work to them on a regular basis.

All that said, it doesn't mean I'm not proud of the sales I've made at the semi-pro/small press level (well, there was an exception last year in which I'm happy with the story, but not so much with where it ended up). So here are my 2007 publications, with the most recent first:

"Prophecy's Birth," Aoife's Kiss, issue 23, December 2007 (if you haven't done so and feel so moved, it's not too late to vote for it as one of your favorites in the issue here)
"To Worship Death," Fictitious Force, issue 4, Summer 2007
"The Poet," The Sword Review, issue 27, June 2007 (which got some nice comments in a review on Tangent, as well as in the 'zine's forums)
"Final Report," Darker Matter, issue 4, June 2007 (Tangent wasn't so nice to this story, but I did get positive comments in the 'zine's forums. I'm still sad that Darker Matter closed up shop after its fifth issue.)
"Love Spells," Leading Edge, issue 53, April 2007 (which got a nice review mention at Whispers of Wickedness)
"Second Moon," The Lorelei Signal, April/May/June 2007 (which was also selected for the 'zine's year-end best of anthology, to be released this spring)
"Troll Bait," AlienSkin Magazine, February/March 2007
"Tastes Like Dolphin," From the Asylum, January 2007

Favorite (In the Sarcastic Sense) Rejection Comment of 2007. It's always a bonus when a market takes the time to offer up comments on a submission, so I greatly appreciate it when that happens. And this year I've gotten some encouraging comments from markets that I would love to crack, which makes for warm fuzzy feelings. But every so often, a real head scratcher of a comment comes along. So without further ado, I present to you my Favorite (In the Sarcastic Sense) Rejection Comment of 2007:

On a 460-word flash piece: "Should be much shorter."