Summer is here

Or at least the summer issue of On Spec is, it landed in my mailbox this morning. Nothing of mine this issue but you should buy it anyway; it's full of great stuff by people like Cat Sparks and Catherine MacLeod. It also has a way-cool cover that's actually a sculpture:




Check it out!

Matthew

Done!

Well, I'm approaching twelve months of unemployment -- about half voluntary, half involuntary -- and while I haven't made much (or really any) money, besides UI payments and a hundred bucks here and there from selling stories, I think I've been reasonably productive: two 80-90,000 word novels and eight short stories. (Actually, I still have to do submission drafts of the stories, but I finished the first draft of the eighth story on Friday).

Now it's back to mundane reality: trying to sell all this stuff (I've actually been trying to sell the novels since April) and find some paying work.

Ah well, back to the salt mines...

Matthew

The gold watch

It's never much fun to retire a story, but usually it's not a difficult decision; after a few rejections I realize that something about the story never quite clicked. The latest story to be trunked is a bit different, though. I've only sent it out to about a half-dozen markets, because its length (10K words) limits the number of places that will look at it, and it's a bit of a weird cross-genre thing so that the rejections I've gotten are mostly of the "good, but not for us" variety (one early rejection of that kind was actually very positive towards the story, which is the main reason I haven't trunked it before).

Ah, well... into the trunk it goes, to await that perfect market...

Matthew

One more "Closing Time" review

Just a quick note -- James Schellenberg of Challenging Destiny has this to say about my contribution to Tesseracts Ten: "I liked Matthew Johnson’s 'Closing Time.' It’s a tale of ghosts and Chinese cooking. Made my mouth water! It stands out as the one major story in the collection that doesn’t try to riff off of standard SF ideas." (I should point out that despite that comment Schellenberg had kind words for many of the other stories, particularly Matt Hughes' "Go Tell The Phoenicians," his favourite story).

Matthew

Found in translation

Coolest news I've had in a while: "Irregular Verbs" is going to be translated into Czech and published in the third volume of Martin Sust's TROCHU DIVNE KUSY anthology (which apparently translates as A LITTLE BIT WEIRD STUFF) from Laser Books. (Make your own damn "Czech" pun here.)

In other news, I just finished first-drafting the seventh of this summer's eight projected stories. Three more weeks before I go back to honest work (whatever that may turn out to be).

Matthew