Today, I started going through my list of stories that are sitting on my hard drive. This has been an incredibly tough year for me in the real world, making following Heinlein’s rules numbers 4 and 5 (You must put your story on the market, and you must keep it on the market until sold) incredibly difficult.
I came up with 8 queries of stories of which I did not know the status. Some were rejected and I was too busy to note it down. That would make for embarrassment if the editors all knew how many queries I sent today. (Most editors don’t read my blog, so I should be safe with the confession.) On others I really haven’t heard back. And the markets that I’m talking about do occasionally vanish while I have something submitted. It has happened more than once to me, and I even got paid and had all rights revert on one occasion.
Including the queries, I had something like 21 stories waiting to get back into the market or with status unknown. I spent a great deal of effort this evening getting some of those back into the market. It’s not as if the Packers were beating the Saints, or anything like that.
Of the 16 stories I had on my list to resubmit, I managed to get 8 back into the marketplace today. Not a bad accomplishment while watching Green Bay give up 51. Ouch.
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I recorded and mixed my first experiment with the Fostex multitrack recorder on saturday. I still need to bounce the tracks over and covert to a stereo wave file, but that should happen soon. If the file size is small enough, I’ll post it here for your listening agony. It’s an unmeasured, unrehearsed, ad-libbed sort-of excerpt from Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The chord sequence is one of the first I learned, and I kind of use it as a warm-up.
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If you are interested in reading some controversy, hop on over to James Maxey’s blog. James has allowed D.N. Drake to post a free-for-all intentionally controversial guest blog post here.