I decided it was time to start submitting my shorts more consistently. Maybe I mentioned that before. About a week ago, I sent out a story that had sold once. Yes, I signed the contract and everything, but the market went belly-up before the story was published, so I never got paid and all rights reverted to me.
This story is a fantasy based in my Atlan universe. This one is about a BlackBird (ie, Warrior) who visits a well-known neighboring village and finds a sister Atlan from a lost tribe has been taken prisoner. This is a huge discovery, but will only amount to anything for her people if she can 1) rescue the prisoner and 2) keep the badly wounded woman alive long enough to get her to her home village.
So far, I like this market. It seems to have some empathy for the authors and the agony they go through as they wait for a response. When you submit to them, you are sent an acknowledging email that includes a reference number and a link to a webpage where you can check on the progress of your submission. When I submitted, my story was #186 in the Infamous Slush Pile. Five days later, it was #102.
This is nice. I wish other markets were this organized. Maybe it only works if the market accepts e-mail submissions. Certainly if this had to be done by hand for a market accepting only hard-copy submissions, it would require time, not to mention a person devoted to do that, and would slow down the process of getting through those submissions. But for those modern, computer-savvy markets who invest in this kind of thing, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I figure I've got about another week before they get to my story. That will help keep the butterflies in check for a few days.
See ya next week. Maybe I'll have news?! Trudy
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