For those who read “The Woman Who Married a Ghost”, the revised version of this Clarion Story is now called “Pahwakhe” and it was just turned down by Nick Mamatas at Clarkesworld, with some encouraging comments and thoughts. I’ll look at it again with his suggestions in mind and see what rings true — I’ve heard at least one of his suggestions before, but remain not quite convinced. The fiction editor at the Canadian journal Prism International encouraged me to send it up, though, so maybe I’ll give it a go there first.

Ha, maybe I’m just not sending out enough stuff, but I don’t feel discouraged yet…

That said, I got a few ink cartridges and will be printing some fiction to send to various places. It looks like I have at least 4 stories, or maybe five, ready to send to various places.

Oh, and I just finished revising the second of six Clarion West stories, “Country of the Young”, tonight. I’m pleased about that and thinking about where to send it. I’ll have to have a think about that.

UPDATE: Actually, I have 7 8 stories to send out:

• “Pahwakhe” (to Prism International, along with a few poems)
• “The Country of the Young” (to ? maybe Asimov’s? or maybe Tesseracts?)
• “The Plea From Factory Unit 5” an Xmas story… (to IGMS)
• “Soul Competency” (to Strange Horizons too long! to F&SF)
• “Bodhisattva” (to WOTF)
• “Scaling Mt. Olympus” (to Analog)
• “Upgraded Phrase List for Mil-Spec iTrans Phrase Translation Unit, Version 5.2.07” (to ?)
• UPDATED! “Junk” (to Chizine)

I would consider sending “The Country of the Young” to Interzone, except for the fact that I e-subbed “Instead of Pinochets” there and you can’t send two stories at once. Maybe I’ll look around and see if any anthologies are looking for anything that fits.

Currently, I’m researching for the rewrite of another Clarion story, “Comfort Woman” (after that, I think I’ll rework “Lester Young…” for those of you waiting for that one), mulling over the question of to which point in my East-Asian Superheroes piece I need to return and start drafting it in a new direction, and thinking over a longer project upon which I’m considering embarking.

UPDATE: As you can see above, I’ve got another story in that folder now: “Junk”, which I’m considering sending over to Shadowed Realms, or maybe Chizine. They both like dark stuff, and this is the darkest possible look at the notion of “Junk DNA” that I could come up with. I asked the question I learned from Ian R. MacLeod: “Who gets hurts most by this development?”