When I decided to pull 24 of my short stories out of circulation and trunk them, fully half of them were out in submission to a market. Today I received a response on the second of those–a rejection. So, 14 now in the trunk, 10 still out.
In the mean time, I’ve been working on new material. As I noted a while back, the story I wanted to finish was giving me fits, and I was never satisfied with the opening. I went back to some older half-finished stuff that was sitting on my hard drive.
I finished the first draft of a story called Espantalho last Friday.  Since then, I picked up on another half-written story that has a premise I have never seen used in the SF genre (though it certainly may have been). That story is going to be a lot heftier than Espantalho. The partial I started with was already 3100 words.
It is currently at 4600 words and will probably wind up being novelette length by a fair margin. (Per SFWA, a novelette is 7500 to 17499 words.) I have a lot to say in this story, which has a working title of Swing Shift. Guaranteed that title won’t give anything away.
Interfering with my writing this week is the fact that I’m in Census training all week. If I still had my old HP iPAQ in working condition, I could probably do a great deal of writing during down times and breaks. Unfortunately, the thing broke a few years ago and I haven’t sent it out for refurbishment. I really miss having that thing available.
