Story Update
An Agreement With Hell, King's Monster, Short Stories
Alas, Permuted Press has issued its TOC, and my story isn’t in it. I’ll have to find another market for it, although because it’s a Lovecraftian based work, the possibilities are a little limited. We’ll see…
On the other hand, getting the implicit rejection (the editor didn’t send out individual emails to those of us who didn’t make the cut) did shake me out of the submission lassitude that’s gripped me since returning from India. I sent out two stories last night and one this morning. One of the stories I submitted, “Fellgate,” had been languishing at another zine for over a year, and although the response to my queries was “we’re still looking at it,” I’ve finally given up. So “Fellgate,” “Destiny” and “The Prince” are all out again. “The Prince” had been accepted by Shadowed Realms right before it closed down, which was very disappointing, so I hope it finds a good home now. I still have a few other stories sitting in submission queues here and there, and I’m just waiting to hear back.
I’m also mulling over the need to send out An Agreement with Hell to another publisher. Like “Fellgate,” it’s been sitting at one place for well over a year since the editor requested the full MS, and my queries about its fate haven’t received a reply. I have to assume that’s an implicit rejection and move on, I think. Unfortunately, Agreement runs 54K words, which is about 4K over most novella ranges and 6K under most novel ranges. Cutting 4K would be very difficult. Adding 6K wouldn’t be impossible, I suppose, but it would take some effort — perhaps more than I’m willing to put into it right now. So I’ll keep looking around for potential markets for it, but I won’t try to rush it out.
In the meantime, I’m finally working on a chapter of King’s Monster that has some hope. I’d been stuck at the same spot for about half a year. At last I scrapped three chapters (painful!), but I was still stuck. Today I decided not to use the viewpoint character I’d been trying hard to use and went back to the main protagonist’s POV, and things are flowing more smoothly. Too early to get overconfident, but at least there’s hope. I have three viewpoint characters and I’ve been trying to keep their number of POV chapters roughly equal, but I think I may just have to accept that one of them will have significantly fewer chapters than the rest. I don’t know why I’ve been resisting that for so long!
drupagliassotti @ March 16, 2008