What I've Been Writing Lately...

I think it's been awhile since I've updated my loyal readers with how my writing is going, so here you go...

*I just queried another agent for Battle for the Wastelands. This makes the fifth agent I've queried for it. So far I've been rejected by two. I have created a list of agents and publishers based on trips through the Alpharetta and Dunwoody Barnes and Noble stores and I'm running out of those. Next it's time to go through 2011 Novel And Short Story Writer's Market and 2013 Writer's Market and see what agents I can find there.

*Completed chapter five of The Cybele Incident, which the title I settled on for my 2012 NaNoWriMo project. I went over it with my Lawrenceville writing group on Sunday. It came through surprisingly unscathed (a fellow group member is a retired Navy petty officer), although it looks like I'll be revising the whole universe to depict artificial gravity as a viable technology. Luckily I recently got new laptop and was able to look up during the meeting a method of artificial gravity that was surprisingly near-term technology-wise. Including it in the story wouldn't require too many painful alterations.

(Having a laptop is really cool for writing-group meetings. Rather than write everything down in a notebook and then have to keep track of physical pages, I can take notes in a Word document.)

*This afternoon I submitted my short story "Ubermensch" to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It's a villain-protagonist superhero story featuring a half-Indian biomedical engineer who follows the creed of Nietzsche (as he understands it, which might not be all that well) and has turned himself into a cyborg. If FSF doesn't want it (I mostly use them as a secondary sort of critique--depending on whether a story didn't grab the editor's interest or hold the editor's interest, I can tell whether the problem is the beginning or the middle), I'll send it off to Daily Science Fiction, which explicitly accepts superhero fiction. At worst, I'll package it with a second story that dovetails a whole lot with "Ubermensch" and self-publish it for e-readers as "Two Tales of Andrew Patel."

*In the middle of revising my short story "Lord Giovanni's Daughter," a sword/sorcery story featuring a barbarian adventurer who is essentially a Norman--a Viking who got civilization but still has the energy and warlike attitude of his uncivilized forebears. My Kennesaw writing group came up with a lot of good suggestions last Saturday. A friend of mine is putting together an anthology of sword and sorcery fiction and failing that, there are still a few more markets out there. The story was purchased (and paid for) by a print magazine in 2008 that went under before it could be printed, so it's among my better works.

*Today I downloaded Celtx, a sort of screenwriting software that I first learned about at a job networking meeting. One local screenwriting group won't even accept screenplays written in Microsoft Word, so this could prove very important. I could probably finish my "Coil Gun" screenplay fairly quickly and writing a "Melon Heads" script shouldn't take that long, so this could prove very important.

*I'll soon start working with the editors of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly on my story "Nicor," which is slated to be posted on their website in April. Given how much they seem to like "Nicor," I'll be sure to send them more of my sword and sorcery work in the future.