Monday, June 6, 2011

Submitted, rejected, being written and consequences..

A status update:

"Trip Hawker and the Asteroid of Vengeance" is waiting to be published in "Rockets, Swords and Rainbows" anthology.
"Trip Hawker and the Point of Death" is currently "in process" with RayGun Revival - meaning it's been read by a slush reader and is waiting for an Editor to peruse. So someone thought it worth pushing along the chain, which is nice.
"The Big Three-oh" was finally let go by "Andromoda Spaceways Inflight Magazine" - it was accepted but didn't fit in with their upcoming issues. They were good enough to give me some kind feedback, so I'll need to see where else this can be submitted.
"Everybody Goes to Hell" has been submitted to WilyWriters competition for members of the Masters of Horror group.

Work in progress:

I'm working on my submission to Masters of Horror: Grave Grimoire - an anthology of undead fiction. My story is a sick little number about pop stars, groupies and weird voodoo priests. It's rolling in at about 6500 words at the moment, but my first re-cut should trim it back to 5000 (lose the more obvious exposition and get rid of the adverbs etc) - then we'll look at the re-jigging and beefing up and toning down. Hopefully a good title will occur to me at some point.

After that:

I am determined to have a go at a novel - BUT what to write....I have several ideas but the fact that nothing has made me run at it (or maybe I'm just daunted by the whole prospect), makes me wonder if that they're just not the "right" idea. Or perhaps I should just get off my lazy butt and write SOMETHING.

Current notions:

Carrie Black is Dead - being the tale of an embittered corpse and a ball of hate.
Strange Days in the Budaland - sword and sorcery in a hot, desert landscape.
What's it all about? - far future society and the search for meaning.

And recent mind-vomit splurged up overnight:

A Boy and his Dog - in a screwed up small town, an abusive father chucks his son's dog out to the mercy of the weird things in the woods. But the dog returns...

Hell, one thing at a time - let's get the voodoo/ popstar story finished and sent off...

Todays drabble is inspired by the life and achievements of Thomas Midgley Jr - who I read about in Bill Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything. Midgley was one of the pioneers of putting lead into petrol, a dangerous process which nearly killed him (when he demonstrated how safe it was to journalists). They made the process safer but the longer term consequences of leaded petrol took many decades to address.

However, Midgley topped this considerable acheivement by inventing CFCs - one of the main contributors to Global Warming. To be fair, it took decades before anyone realised CFCs were a problem, but it makes you wonder about how much we might consider the wider consequences of our actions...

Oog was freezing. No matter how many skins he heaped on himself, he was still cold. He rubbed sticks together to keep moving and warm. Suddenly there was a spark and then a flame.
He felt warmth and added more sticks.
Sog arrived with a deer. There was something orange by Oog. He sat down.
“It’s warm,” said Sog.
“Neat, eh?” said Oog.
“We should do more of it,” said Sog.
“We need wood,” said Oog, “we’d need to cut down some of these trees.”
Sog shrugged. “There are millions of trees. We’ll never run out. What could go wrong?”