Boy, this day's starting off bad. In addition to my rejection from Shimmer, I just got back a form rejection from Strange Horizons. I think I'll send this one off to F&SF next.

I made the first of my changes to "Independence Day" but I added like 500 words. That seems like a lot (though I guess it's really only about 2 pages) but I'll take nap and come back to it and see what I think then.

I've been blogging way too often, so I'm going to try to keep it down to once a day for now on, two at most if unexpected news comes up. It's time better spent writing.

Final tally for today: 2 rejections, though one is also a request for rewrite, one submission sent out, to Ideomancer, one rewrite completed to first run status, moving the story up from about 1700 to 2300.

Filed under obvious insanity: I considered for a little while sending "The Last Arabian Prince" (the SH rejected story) to Jim Baen's Universe, even through that obnoxious slushpile of theirs on the bar. But then I took the time to look at some of the most recent posts and discovered that most of the readers over there seemed to have changed their eyes to brimstone and sprouted demon fangs and are actively eviscerating "literary" (that's their word for them) stories for the sheer glee of it. And since LAP is not particularly adventure-oriented and is a tad political, I decided it wouldn't go over well and promptly returned to reality and sent it somewhere a little more appropriate. Kind of like I ocassionally need to eat sausage to remind myself just how much I hate it, I had to drop by the bar and remind myself why I left in the first place.