Submissions and writing

I finished my latest story just before I went off to Cyprus and now it is going through a critique group. Comments on the first chapter were favourable, which is a good sign. I find this group most helpful and I learn a good deal by reading their work. Let's hope they stay with me to the end.

I've already begun a new tale. This time I've deliberately made my heroine older and already a widow. Not that it makes her old, or even what we would call mature these days. But by the standards of the early 1800s, she was no longer considered a girl at 26. It will be an interesting exercise, as most all of my other heroines have been exceedingly young.

I checked up on my submissions this morning. Samhain took 7 weeks to reject with this: "liked the premise of your plot and felt your writing was strong, unfortunately I did not feel sufficiently compelled by the storyline and the characters to offer a contract."

I'm still musing that one over. Perhaps I make my young heroines characterless?

Then there's the full submission to HM&B. The 18 weeks is up on 20th December. Perhaps I'd better give them an extra week or two before I query that one! The partial with them has only been there fifteen weeks, so....

I subbed to P'sF on 5th July. When I telephoned to ask if they'd ever received it, they said they had and though they had a huge backlog, I should hear something soon.

Yesterday I finished looking over Shadows, the book that got hung up in litigation over Triskelion's collapse, and subbed it to Dark Eden Press. (DEP) It's a fairly new online publisher, so perhaps won't have such a huge backlog of stuff to sift through. They deal with e-books only, which is what Shadows was written for, and promise a response within six weeks.

So, now it's a case of sitting back, getting on with the new book, and trying not to chew my nails as I wait...and wait...and wait. And I hate waiting for anything!