You Know What’s Cool? Strange Horizons Is Cool
As an upstart n00bie writer in the fantasy field, I tend to be very fond of those editors who actively seek out and nurture upstart n00bie writers in the fantasy field.
I know, right? Shocker!
That’s one of the many reasons I adore Black Gate Magazine with radiant rip-tides of affection. The time and attention these editors bestow on their writers is mind-boggling. You think you’ve written something pretty okay, and then the editors get their scalpels and flensing knives and broadswords right into the meat of it, and your story suddenly becomes EPIC LIKE BEOWULF!
And that’s an experience I had recently with Strange Horizons‘ editor Karen Meisner.
Back in late July, Strange Horizons accepted my story “Household Spirits,” which went live online today.
In the interim between acceptance and publication, there was the Editing Process.
Several weeks ago I waxed on about 
A few years ago, I lived and worked in Edgewater, a northerly Chicago neighborhood just blocks from fantasy writer Ysabeau Wilce’s house. She once confessed to having walked her dog past my bookstore on Broadway and Bryn Mawr. The unutterable excitement!
Five years ago, my first novel, Poison Study was published. It came out in hardback with a beautiful red and gold cover that was loosely based on Vermeer’s painting The Girl with the Pearl Earring.
Back in 1995, I’m reading Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy – because I had written a bunch of short stories that were all soundly rejected and I was thinking perhaps I needed a few pointers (no comments on still having my short stories rejected).
Tonight, children go trick-or-treating, and many adults go to Halloween parties, thereby, perhaps, proving Ogden Nash’s line that children get more joy out of childhood than adults get out of adultery. For myself, though, I’ll be counting down the minutes to midnight, scrawling notes and making plans. Because at 12 AM, November 1, 
Jeff Crook, the mastermind behind 
The false motivational poster to the left has nothing to do with the rest of my post today, except that it came as a reward to myself after a week of tough self-disciplined writing, aided by the simple power of time awareness. As I finished my enormous work on late Sunday evening, I celebrated my triumph with a small but exquisite waste of time, creating one of the many “demotivational posters” that travel around the ‘net as humor or an approximation of humor. Better than LOLCats, at least. This is my deep inner Tolkien Geek, who has always wondered what the Lord of the Nazgûl thought as he died under Éowyn’s blade on the Pelennor Fields. My guess: “Damn fine print!”