What are you reading? (apart from this)

[SamLeeFreak]

On the plus side, I am almost done editing them all and by Saturday (ideally) they will have all been sent out. Then I can start collecting rejection slips. 

  That's a good attitude to take. Can't remember who it was, but I remember somebody saying they wallpapered their writing room with rejection slips. Thinking about it, that would be enough to make one of those motivational gurus top himself, wouldn't it? The exact opposite of 'surrounding yourself with success'

As long as I still have ideas to write about, I'm happy! 

[Geoff_N]

Everybody says they can paper their walls with rejection slips. These days the rejections are more likely to be electronic so unless you print them out, your walls are safer. Robert Blevins and I have had to send many rejections to hopeful authors after their submissions to our Escape Velocity sci fi magazine. This is mainly because they didn't read the submission guidelines. You'd be amazed how many submit pieces 2000 words too long; romance lit stories when we ask for hard sci fi; work that is published elsewhere without copyright transferral; prologues or first chapters of a novel where it couldn't be a stand-alone story; and the odd (very) sexist, rascist, illegal content that wasn't justified by the context And those are subs that were legible and written mainly with correct punctuation, grammar and only a few pleonasms. Nevertheless, it is a privilege to read them and if you want to make me happy submit a sci fi story for issue #2 with <5000 words (better still around 2,500).

I'm about to read Geoff Ryman's Air, and thanks to Neil, I'm looking for 'God: The Failed Hypothesis' by Victor Stenger.

Geoff

[SharonBell]

I have several books in play--I keep one in the car, one in my briefcase & one in the loo.

So, the most pressing one at the mo' is the one my dog ate. No, not a typo. The beast was very quiet...and I looked around after working for hours on a report...and he ate my BOOK!

As my students would say: the dog ate my homework!

[Sallyq]

Ooh, Geoff, I wrote a piece on my Ask Sally feature on my blog yesterday about submitting to anthologies, and touched on people not adhering to guidelines. I wonder if I could copy and paste what you've just said (properly attributed of course with a link to your site and adventurebooks) and add it to the answer. You've explained everything I wanted to say about why stuff gets turned down.

[Ed]

My dog has a brain fart every so often and shreds a bunch of books. I found a couple of Dean Koontz novels and To Kill A Mockingbird at the top of the garden, in pieces I wouldn't mind so much if he was discerning, but he always targets my books, and not my wife's

[Geoff_N]

Ooh, Geoff, I wrote a piece on my Ask Sally feature on my blog yesterday about submitting to anthologies, and touched on people not adhering to guidelines. I wonder if I could copy and paste what you've just said (properly attributed of course with a link to your site and adventurebooks) and add it to the answer. You've explained everything I wanted to say about why stuff gets turned down.

It would be an honour to be quoted in Ask Sally, Sally.

My wife is pulling at my elbow as we should have been in the car now en route to John Lennon airport.

see yaaaaaaa

[Sallyq]

Cheers, Geoff!

[Sallyq]

When you get back, you can read it here, Geoff.

http://quillersplace.blogspot.com/2007/10/ask-sally-17-getting-into-anthology.html

As I said, it's actually a feature about how to get into an anthology, but I think your problem is one that's shared by the anthologisers.

[Ed]

Funny - Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Steven King, not available at Amazon.co.uk - I know it's an American publication, but I'd have thought it was important enough to be an item in serious book sellers' catalogues worldwide. I ordered it from Amazon.com easily enough, though. Odd they have different merchandise, huh? Looking forward to reading it.

[Sallyq]

That's very odd, Ed, because I ordered it from Amazon.co.uk and even have an affiliates link to it at amazon.co.uk on my blog. It took about a fortnight to get here though.

[Sallyq]

Here you go, this is the link via my affiliates thingy. It says it takes 1-4 weeks to arrive.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0618713484?tag=sallyquilford-21&camp=1406&creative=6394&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0618713484&adid=14698FRKS9V5N77Q1Q77&

[Ed]

Cuh! Thanks for that, Sally. I used their search facility on the site and it never showed up as a result - it showed Best American Mysteries or something like that, but no BASS. That's when I ended up buying the hardback version from the US site. Might see if I can cancel the order and get the paperback from the UK site instead

[rootofevil]

Lack of reading over the last 10 days or so, but the three weeks before that...


Clive Barkers Hellbound Heart, Books of Blood 1 & 2, along with In the Flesh
John Skipp's Long Last Call
Undead: Flesh Feast (Zombie Anthology put out by Permuted Press)
An Advanced Reading Copy of Robert Newcombs Rise of the Blood Royal
Along with the Dummies Guide to the Universe 

[delboy]

The Books of Blood! Cool. I have those tucked away at the bottom of a box somewhere. Some of those tales were brilliant, and a couple of them haunt me in a kind of good way. The Hellbound Heart, too. I've kind of lost touch with Clive Barker's work. Some of the novels - such as Weaveworld, and another one that I've forgotten the title of (but that started in a lost mail room somwhere in the States and ended up in New Mexico with atom bombs being tested... or something!) were great. Massive vision.

Alas, I'm still fighting my way through Pompeii.

I have, though, bought a whole bunch of books this week from the cheap bookstore just across the road. I'm like a kid at Christmas. What shall I read next: Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke, Beneath The Underdog by Charlie Mingus, The Godfather, Sudden Mischief by Robert Parker, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, Helen Keller's autobiography, or a collection of Tom Wait's interviews?

Ain't books great? 

Del

[SamLeeFreak]

I'm thinking of reading Freakshow today. My brains still a little too beaten down from the massive editing weekend to even think about working on the second half of my novel yet