"Picking Up Plans in Palma" got rejected from Analog, although it was a personalized rejection letter signed by the editor. I tinkered with it a bit more (mostly breaking up longer sentences into shorter, punchier ones) and then submitted it to Asimov's. I don't think I'll hear from them for three months or so.
"Coil Gun" got rejected by Lightspeed, so I sent it to Clarkesworld. I should hear back from them relatively soon. Last time I checked, it was 37th in the queue.
"Melon Heads" got rejected by the Extreme Creatures anthology, so I sent it to GUD. Not sure when I'll hear back from them. Their way of paying their writers is weird, although it certainly gives the writers an incentive to promote the magazine (the writers get a cut of sales of the individual story, for example).
I've realized that I don't have any "ready to send" stories anymore. All of mine are either sent somewhere or part of an anthology I'm working on with Daverana Enterprises, the parent company of the magazine that bought three of my stories (paying me for two) before it was shut down.
Time to crack my knuckles and work on some new short fiction (in addition to Escape from the Wastelands and my last fan-fiction, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Reboot").
I've got one completed first draft for my short story "Breeding Pair" (which takes place in the same universe as my story "Illegal Alien") and a bunch of old Critters critiques for it. That's going to be an interesting one to bring to my writing groups, given that it has some risque content (one alien race abducts humans for a breeding program) and it depicts Jesus as having appeared to another alien race sometime after He appeared to our own.
(I got that concept from C.S. Lewis's essay "Religion and Rocketry," which I read in the book The World's Last Night: And Other Essays
. Lewis quotes "Christ in the Universe" by Alice Meynell, which is probably the only poem I like besides Yeats' "The Second Coming" and, if you want to call it a poem, "Beowulf.")I've also got another WWIII story set in my Afrikaner universe, for which I've written perhaps three sentences. It takes place the same night as "Coil Gun"--the opening nuclear exchange between the United States and the Afrikaner Confederation--and follows a squadron of spaceplanes engaging the Afrikaners' primary orbital battle-station.
I brought the second chapter of Escape from the Wastelands--which draft it is I cannot remember at this point--before my Lawrenceville writing group last Sunday. They had some good comments, which I have not yet incorporated because I've had to finish the first draft of a new third chapter for the Kennesaw writing group. That group meets this Saturday.
This could be an interesting meeting, considering how the third chapter exists solely because they did not think there was adequate characterization in the earlier chapters to make the first version of Chapter Three--in which several characters die--really affect the reader.
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