I just shipped “Minotaur Horns” to Cicada today. I’m sick of looking at it. I made some significant changes from the earlier draft, mostly based on what the Clarionites who read it had to say. I changed the ending somewhat and added some words there which extends an already longish denouement. Not by much, but a little. It started at over 6K words, trimmed it to 4.1K, and finally settled at 4.5K. Does it work? No idea. We’ll see what the folks at Cicada have to say.

That makes seven things out. I’ve got an eighth almost ready to go but it needs some serious editing. It’s only 2K words long and the narrative switches POV five times, each one showing a different reaction to a coal miner’s death and multiple resurrections. Whether I pull this off successfully is highly debatable and, because most slush is utter junk, toying with conventions is always a dangerous game. A slush reader is quite likely to think the first POV shift is an amateurish mistake rather than a structural ploy and there’s no tactful way of saying, “Please pay attention,” in the cover letter. Better to just make it as engaging as possible and hope I’ve built enough trust to get the benefit of the doubt. Andy Duncan switches POV in “The Grand Guginol” and I will check that out to see how he succeeded. That story sold to Weird Tales but this one will probably go to either Strange Horizons or F&SF .

I like having this number of stories out. I think this is the most I’ve had out at the same time. I need to reshuffle them once the rejections start rolling in — the one currently at Asimov’s will go to SCIFI.com next, for example, and once Asimov’s “opens” to me once again (you can’t send to a magazine if they already have a story of yours pending, in most cases) I’m going to send yet another version of “Black Jack Davy,” which is beginning to feel like an albatross around my neck. Right now it stands at 9K and it probably needs to lose a good 3K words. The nice part is that cutting is much faster than writing, and I think most of the writing is decent but there are too many sidebars that take away from the immediate action.

All of my stories out right now are between 1K to 5K words. Before I send out another longer story, I think I need to look at what holds longer stories together.

I would love to sell another story before the end of the year to add to the ol’ CV before applying for grad school. Come What May, I guess…