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".

P.I. MANNING RUN OVER BY A PICKUP TRUCK

I've been struggling again with the futuristic novel, and this morning, my frustrated gaze fell upon this short story, "The Pickup", whose first page is to the left. It's been sent out wandering 7 times over the years, but it's been a long time between the last time and now. So I went through it again, the third full revision, calked the holes in it, I hope, and put a fresh coat of paint on the old structure, w/o altering it's hidden naughtiness. I don't count as revisions all the times I've skimmed it for language. The tale's now on its merry way through the application, Submittable, to a large West Coast literary magazine in a transcendental city named after a Saint. These Spring days aren't the most favorable for sending to literary magazines supported by state institutions because most are shutting down for the Summer and won't be accepting again till in the Fall. However, I keep an eye on that detail and hope not to waste my time. Another publication would get my novelistic engine firing again, I'd think. I've got high hopes for it, then, again, I always do until it's been rejected several times more and comes back home with its tale [sic] between its legs.