I know I haven’t touched this blog in many months.  Been really busy with full time work, part time school, writing short stories and submitting short stories.

That last one’s worth mentioning because it’s so very time consuming.  You wouldn’t believe just how much time and effort goes into magazine research, tailoring my submission to the individual magazines requirements, writing cover letters, checking and double-checking everything before hitting the submit button, and of course staring at my e-mail while constantly hitting the refresh button, waiting for a response.  Some of them are amazingly quick to reply but the average is generally about 3-4 months. There’s some that hold on to submissions for as long as 9 months.  Yeah… I don’t bother submitting to those ones.

Some good news:  My short story, “The Oubliette”, has been picked up by Fortress Publishing and will be appearing in the second issue of their recently launched magazine called “The Realm Beyond”.  Issue #2 is set to be released this July Confluence in Pittsburgh.

For the next year I’m going to continue to concentrate on short stories to build up my publishing credentials. Once I have a few more acceptances for short stories, I’ll try again with another round of novel submissions.  I’m hoping that once I have a few small successes under my belt that people will be willing to take a closer look at longer works.