Month: April 2020

Posted on By jessmeats
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    • Submission response

    I’ve received what was effectively a “please wait” email about a short story I submitted recently. The place I submitted to want a specific number of stories and they’re waiting until the end of their submission period before they decide which ones they’re accepting, which makes sense.

    I’m not sure if they send out the same email to everyone about making the decision when the submission period closes or if they do a first round of reviewing the stories. I’m hoping the second, and I think it makes sense given that there was about a week between me submitting the story and receiving the response. It’s plausible that they go through initial submissions to divide into no and maybe piles, and then go through the maybes when they have all the submissions. In which case, it would mean that they read my story and didn’t reject it right away and I’m now in a short list pool.

    So I’m being optimistic about this story and its chances. Fingers crossed.

    Posted on By jessmeats
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    • Writing Update

    I’ve submitted a short story this weekend. It’s one I’m very proud of so I hope it is received well. This is the third time I’ve tried sending the story out. The first time, I received a form rejection, the second time I received a personalised rejection, so hopefully this continuing trend of improvement means that the third response will be an acceptance. Who knows? I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

    I have next week booked off work and since all my wonderful travel plans are cancelled due to plague, I intend to spend some of the time working on my writing. I have edits for the third book in the Shadows of Tomorrow trilogy to go through. Edits are never the most fun part of writing a book for me, but they are important so my plan is to spend some of every day working through those to get it done.

    I also have the second draft of the fourth Codename Omega book to finish. I’m nearly done, but there’s a plot thread from near the beginning that sort of trails off. I need to try and tidy that up a little bit before I let someone else read the story. This fourth book is a little different from the first three in the series in a way that was a lot of fun to write and that I hope will be a lot of fun for other people to read.

    I may not be able to use the time they way I’d intended, but at least I can use it productively, in between trying to get exercise despite social distancing restrictions. I’m trying to make the best of things, which is all we really can do.

    Posted on By jessmeats
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    • Diverse Reading Challenge

    There are various diverse reading challenges out there, but I’ve made my own for me. Other people are welcome to take this and adapt if if you want. I intend to read:

    • Written by an author of colour x 5
    • Main character of colour
    • Translated into English
    • Written by a trans author
    • Trans main character
    • Asexual main character
    • Gay main character
    • Lesbian main character
    • Non-binary main character
    • A classic I’ve never read before x 2
    • Written by a disabled author
    • Disabled main character
    • Non-neurotypical main character
    • A genre other than SF&F x 5
    • Mentally ill main character
    • Book I loved as a child
    • Based on non-European folk tales
    • Poetry
    • Book from a small press
    • Self-published book

    I expect there will be overlap between these characters. I read a lot of SF&F books, so I’m specifically going to try and read 5 books in other genres to widen my reading, but it’s likely that some or all of those 5 will also meet at least one of the other criteria.

    I will share reviews and progress here and on my YouTube channel.

    Any recommendations people have for books that meet some or all of these criteria would be welcome. If you’re an author and your book meets any of these criteria, let me know.