So, we pass the half way point with fifteen acceptances. Here's the second half of the year:
July 11th: Strong Branch's 'Tales from the Radiator' podcast strand take Audit's Abacus, previously published by Daily Science Fiction. This is the only story that I have ever had people come to me to republish - in that case, they had nothing to offer, but Strong Branch put a few dollars in the pot, so here it is again. Another sale, another pint...
July 21st: Mark Bilsborough's Wyldflash accept The Naming of the 'Ark Royal', a previously unpublished flash involving a spaceship launched by a fictional British monarch who, oddly, must have found himself one place further up the queue between acceptance and publication in September.
July 31st: Dragon Gems accept The Credo of Comrade January, a previously unpublished, long for a short (10k) weird fiction story about parallel universes and the square root of minus one. I make life difficult for myself, don't I? No news on publication date.
August 7th: Spacemaid, a slightly dreamy, but previously unseen, flash gets into a car badged Factor Four and drives away. It appears in Issue 15 in August.
September 12th: Eric Formley's Troopers slips an abridged version of military SF How Did They Get You? - originally featured in 2019 in James Gunn's Ad Astra - the King's shilling and it appears in late September.
November 15th: WolfSinger Publications come in for The Hazamesam Seance, a genre-flipping story that starts in 1950s rural Ireland and ends... well, not on this planet. It's destined for their 'Ring of Fire' anthology. It's another story that has racked up well over 50 submissions - in fact, I'm really not sure how many, it being one of my first stories, before I kept a strict record of submissions, a Theseus' Ship of a tale, initially a ghost story, then rewritten into sci-fi around ten years ago, and rewritten again recently with its second change of title.
December 28th: To end the year with a round two dozen acceptances, Don't Eat the Bundyroot will appear in 'Under the Stairs: An Anthology of Homebound Horror'. I was in two minds whether to take them up on the offer, this being just a section of a 14,000 word novella that's done the rounds but which I now won't be able to submit again, at least as an unpublished novella - but markets dry up quickly at that length, plus if I didn't want them to take it, why send it?! But the 'we love it' email does tend to crystalise one's thinking - maybe I was just sending it out to verify it was as good as I thought it was...
So, 424 submissions have garnered 24 acceptances - 17 of previously unpublished stories - and 373 rejections. A bumper year, but one unlikely to be repeated as I'm simply not writing stories at an adequate replacement rate. That said, I'm hopeful of at least the requisite three sales in 2023. But only time will tell...
And no, I haven't finished that novel yet!
Happy New Year!
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2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
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