When do authors find time to update their blogs? When they discover the Gator-Maryland game isn’t on at 7, it’ll be on at 7:30. And with Florida a 36-point favorite, I imagine it’ll be over by 8. Houston’s already used up all the underdog luck for today.

The last two weeks have seen me hit a mini-hot streak. I had my very first speculative fiction story, “The Glittering Point,” finally accepted after after 42 rejects, 2 previous titles and many rewrites along the way. It’s either urban fantasy or light horror set in Chicago. It’ll be in a new magazine called Unnerving in their first issue this December.  The lesson: Just as there’s someone perfect for everyone in this world, there’s a perfect market for every story, provided your diligent about searching and have patience

I also had a slightly younger story, “The Other Face of Medusa,” taken by the annual anthology called The Martian Wave. It’s a response to Clarke’s “Meeting with Medusa,” which answers the question, Whose funding gets cut to support another’s discovery in space?

And Daily Science Fiction took “18 Things Only A Martian Mom Will Understand (You Won’t Believe #13!),” which was inspired by Cassandra Khaw‘s tweet prompt, “Write a Buzzfeed headline from a dystopia.” The story wrote itself. If Medusa was my first stab at humor, this one suggests I may be getting the hang of it–even if it’s a series of one-liners.  This will be my fifth story in DailySF, for whom I wrote the story specifically, suggesting I’m also getting the hang of what they want.

In Dragon Round news, Booklist gave it a very favorable review:

This is a promising start to the series, and future books will hopefully…bring on more dragon showdowns.

Oh, they will. The sample chapter and synopsis for The Dragon Tower is off to Paul the Agent for submitting to S&S. With Simon451 becoming defunct and Brit the Champion leaving for Orbit, I understand that it’s facing an uphill battle, but my fingers are crossed anyway.

Meanwhile, friends keep sending me pictures of it in stores around the country, which is awesome, plus it’s up to 4 stars on Amazon with 16 reviews, which is a nice bump from the 3ish stars on Goodreads after 100+ reviews.

And The Revivalist was podcast by Gallery of Curiosities, as well as Radio Riel Steampunk. What an amazing job they did.

 (Update: My weekend is starting better than the Gators’, who are only up by 3 in the 3rd quarter because they’re trying their best to let UMass win. Zetetic just took my story “The Time Traveler” in a record 7 hours, 5 minutes (and pubd it after a couple edits 2.5 hours later!). It’s more experimental than most of my stories, but that’s what appealed to them. I wonder how long I can ride this streak.)