War Journal 37: A Man of Your Considerable Talent...

My tenacity in the trenches precedes me.

If you guys following my adventures through the world of written stories think that updates are far and few between, you’d be right. There are long stretches between updates, even counting rejection letters, dry times where no news is no news. I combat these epochs of waiting with variety, at least on the blog, where I’m either telling you all about my life deployed or providing writing tips and a look at other web sites for writers. Sometimes I rant… but I try to stay upbeat and angst free.

So here I was contemplating content, when out of the blue I get a message from a publisher. This is normally commonplace for a writer… those “no’s” gotta come from somewhere. Only thing is, I didn’t have a story under consideration with these guys.

The Strange, Weird and Wonderful folks emailed me directly to ask if I would be interested in writing a story for their upcoming Inanimates Anthology. They remembered me from a previous story I sold them called “Of Badges and Brownies” (trust me, the name’s appropriate…). Before they could publish the story, they changed their business model, killed their quarterly magazine, and started focusing solely on anthologies.

This is a milestone, guys. I spend my time and bandwidth beating the streets for sells, avoiding plot holes like pot holes, trying to close the deal with taut action and gripping narrative. Buyers are rare like food in a famine. Yet here, in my inbox, is a request. A solicitation for a manuscript. I thought those things were myths…

I said yes, as I figure there’s some unspoken rule that a writer has to accept his or her first solicited manuscript. Besides, who the hell am I to say no? I prefaced my acceptance with the admission that I had never written a story where inanimate objects are personified. Strange, Weird and Wonderful still seemed confident that I could pull it off.

Guess my last story convinced them I am a man of considerable talent…

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