Philip Brewer's Writing Progress

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Monday, 27 August 2001

I got a nice note from Marissa Lingen, pointing out that there is some useful information to be gleaned from rejection slips, especially ones with personal comments. That's certainly true, and I hadn't meant to say that I didn't read rejection slips closely enough to see if the editor hadn't said something beyond what was on the form. (Oh, and the correct term is "rejectomancy." There's actually quite a bit about it on the web if you do a web search. The term "rejectionslipomancy" doesn't seem to be in common use, although I think it's funnier. Diana Rowland credits Kurt Roth (who, as editor of Age of Reason, bought a story of mine) with coining the term.

In fact, though, I haven't actually gotten many personal comments. So far, except for my two sales, I've nearly always gotten a form rejection. I think the personal rejections will start coming, though. Hopefully, along with some sales.

I did get some writing done today. I'm working on a piece I started at Clarion, but only wrote a few paragraphs before getting distracted by something else. It called to me today, so I started fiddling with it again. It's not a likely sale, so I won't spend much time on it. But it's not an impossible sale, and I want to work on it. So, I'll just see if I can't write it quickly. I wrote about 140 words at Clarion. Now it's got 420, so that's 280 new words.

And, I did get the Sthii story, "Whole Other Language" out to Analog.

It's so much fun to have stories out again, after a period of having none out. It makes the future pregnant with possibilities.


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