After a great weekend working on la casa, having a patio and porch put in, and then painting and decorating my office/writer’s sanctuary (a future post with pics, to be sure), I both returned to The Job and snuck in a little writing.

Things are progressing well at The Job, in that I am learning the ropes and becoming more of a solver than one whom relies upon others for solutions, but so much of the work there consists of us being a clearinghouse for negativity. And in other locales which report to us at The Job, there was a great deal to feel negative about. This weekend, people were uniformly awful to one another, with many a heinous crime committed upon one another, and we get all the dirty (both literally and figuratively dirty) details.

So, needing a pick-me-up, I turned to fiction, specifically creating my own. I was able to chop quite a few more pages into the re-write of “ILYAMY” and I finally broke ground on the new “Strategic Deployment” script. I’m buoyed by both projects and hope to be able to show something here soon.

Refreshed and optimistic once more, I got home and checked the snail-mail out front.

Yep. Mistake.

I saw my own handwriting on a letter, the self-addressed, stamped envelopes from one of my ASID submissions. That’s never good. I’m pretty sure publishing contracts don’t come in slender business envelopes. Dreading the obvious, I opened it to reveal a lovely form rejection letter from Peter Stampfel of DAW books.

He thanked me for the contribution, it’s very hard for a new writer to get picked up and be successful these days, we don’t feel your manuscript would be a commercial success at the present, but we’ve rejected gold before, so don’t stop trying and remember us when it comes time to submit your next un-sell-able manuscript.

On the good side, that’s a pretty quick turnaround. I submitted the full manuscript to DAW by the regular post on May 1st. Give it a week for mail routing, a ten days to languish in a slushpile, 15 seconds to hate everything about all 116,000 words (or as far into the first page they’re willing to give it), a day to process the rejection letter, and then two to three days for it to show up in my box, then you can obviously see they gave it their full consideration.

Who’s next on the rejection train? Ace? Baen? Pyr? C’mon, I’m ready for it!