THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE HUCKLEBERRY

The rewritten "All About Jane" has already been rejected by a magazine called Chestnut Review which collected a fat $5 fee for considering it. They took all of 5 days to consider it. Fair to say I get rejected a lot. Most writers do unless they have huge name recognition, but 5 days and $5? Makes me think it could be a scam. Easy... form a magazine, put it into Poets & Writers Magazine and charge a $5 reading fee. Publish the magazine online for very low cost and make at least pocket money rather than lose money as I did publishing George & Mertie's Place. Most magazines these days use Submittable to handle mss and Submittable gets $3 to handle a ms. Fair enough, but $5? I'm tearing up my file card for that market. Too suspicious. 

by rob mulally @unsplash

Good news on the other hand. One of my poems has been accepted by current Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna. It appears on the map. You will find the poem by clicking on the red button about 2/3 of the way on Interstate 90 from Spokane to Seattle. A very handy blip on I-90 occurs just below the red dot. The dot represents Huckleberry Mountain in the North Cascades whose name is in the title of my poem "Group Encounter at Huckleberry Mountain".

BEACH WALKS, CHAPTERS AHEAD, CLEAR SAILING FOR WEEKS

the beaches we walked

Over the weekend, in celebration of my 76 birthday (October 20th) my wife and I spent a weekend on Camano Island, north of Seattle, walking the beaches in fog and mist with nary a sign of sunshine, except in the love in our hearts for each other. That's all sunshine. Camano Island is stuck between Whidbey Island and the Washington Coast. Hardly an island at all, a couple of dump trucks of dirt would fill in the slough and creek that separates the mainland from Camano Island. We drove to La Conner, north of Camano Island for fried oysters. In fact, I broke so free of my vegan/vegetarian regime that I put on five pounds in two days of eating, but three disappeared as soon as we returned to Vancouver. Like magic. 

Today, I roughed out ideas for the next two or three chapters of Manning, adding several mysterious deaths that will puzzle Manning and, I hope the reader too. As I've said before, I see the ending, with only one decision to be made there, but getting to that ending should be all the fun of it for the reader.