A Few Updates

Just a couple more days to enter my contest if you're of a mind to. The deadline is midnight Sunday, April 6. I'll do the drawing sometime next week and announce the two winners here.

I didn't make it around to blogs yesterday. I spent the whole day, from 7:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night at am OHRP conference. OHRP stands for Office for Human Research Protections. This is one of the major government agencies that overseas human research in the United States to make sure that it meets ethical standards. How did I end up at such a conference, you may ask. It's because, at Xavier University where I teach, I'm also chairperson of the IRB (Internal Review Board), which is often known as the Human Subjects Committee. We are sort of the OHRP of Xavier and oversee all the human research there.

Although I generally don't care a lot for conferences where you spend your day sitting, sitting, sitting, taking notes, there was a fair amount of interesting stuff at this one. And it was stuff I needed to know and my committee needs to know. Plus, I had to present on problems and solutions to the difficulties that IRBs at small universities experience. The presentation went well, despite the fact that I'd been rather dreading it.

Anyway, I'm back today, just in time to get notice that "Love in the Time of Cybersex" has been rejected once again. And this could be the ultimate indignity. The story was rejected from a magazine that was publishing an "all rejects" issue, all stories that had been rejected before by other magazines. Ouch! Well, it was actually outside their word count so I can console myself with that as the reason for the rejection. I'm not giving up on this tale, though. Each rejection makes me believe in it more. (Talk about irrational thinking!)

PS: If you haven't had a chance to read and vote for my wife's (Lana) hilarious drinking story yet, time is running out. You need to vote today, and she's in a neck n neck race for the championship. The link is HERE. Check it out!

And now, off to visit blogs and comment on the comments made on my recent post.

Flash Present Day

Yesterday I posted some rejections from my past. Today I have current news. Dreams and Nightmares accepted a poem from me called "Blue Soul." D and N is one of the premiere poetry magazines in the speculative poetry world and I've been hoping to sell them something. David C. Kopaska-Merkel is the editor there and I have great respect for his work.

On the other hand, I had a story rejected by Space and Time. It was a nice rejection, though. I quote: "Your piece came up through the editorial ranks and made the "final" grouping under consideration, but alas, we've decided to pass on it. Good luck with the story elsewhere, and keep writing!"

This was for a tale called "Love in the Time of Cybersex," which I originally wrote for an anthology at the request of the editor. It was accepted for that anthology, but they ended up unable to get funding for it and the story reverted back to me. I've tried it at most of the big SF markets now without luck so will have to send it to some smaller markets. I think the problem is that it has too much romance/sex in it for the primary SF audience. The anthology was going to be called "Erotic Women."

This is one of the things you can face in a writing career. You get an opportunity and write a piece to match that opportunity. But if that situation doesn't pan out the story has to either be reslanted or completely revised. In this case, the romantic elements are so much a part of the story that rewriting it just doesn't make sense so I'll keep sending it out until I find a market that wants it.

At least with fiction I will probably eventually sell the piece. I once spent an entire month writing four articles for a non-fiction book on Star Trek. The book never materialized and only one of the four pieces ever sold. The other three were so specific to that book that there was no other market for them, and they've all long since become outdated. So figure three weeks of writing time wasted.
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