It's April. What does that mean? It means it's time for me to bitch about taxes again.

It's amazing, that for twenty years now, I have made an effort every single year to make this as easy and painless on myself as possible.

I'm not talking about saving money, or getting the biggest deduction like most of the pathetic U.S. ... I'm just talking about making it easy to get the shit paid so I can get back to my life.

What's most amazing is that I have failed every single year for the past 20.

... but hopefully not a dollar short.

Yes, it's another podcast!

I hope you'll forgive the delay, but I've had to shovel my driveway every single day since last Friday. It's more time-consuming than you might think.

Anyway, enjoy our take on Heinlein's 5 laws, what to do with your endings, and how to make readers care about your story.

Well, we got another few inches of snow last night, but far less than the doomsayers were predicting. Anyone run out of toilet paper yet?

I came in to work early this morning. It was worth it. With the roads nearly empty, I was able to fly along in my Subaru ... skidding everywhere, snow flying ... with no worries that the other drivers would ruin my fun.

Got just a bit of snow over the weekend, and getting just a bit more now.

I'm sure lots of folks north of me are laughing at how inept Pittsburgh is in dealing with a paltry 20" of snow. But this is a 5 year storm (i.e. a storm that only happens, on average, every 5 years) and the city's infrastructure is really only designed for the average storm. Seems kind of stupid to me, but I only pay a small amount of taxes compared to everyone else, so nobody cares about my opinion.

Anyway, my house looks beautiful covered in snow. Looks like the cover of a christmas card:

This weeks Triangulation podcast revealed something that was surprising to me: most writers don't work anywhere near as hard on their stories as I do.

This wouldn't be surprising to me if the other writers I was talking to hadn't been considerably more successful than me.

We accepted 3 stories this week for Triangulation: End of the Rainbow, and we still have two rewrite requests out.

This past Saturday, we met to go through another pile of stories for Triangulation: End of the Rainbow.

Not a bad week, overall. It's a little frightening that we've had no outright acceptances yet (only rewrite request), but it's still early, and I'm hoping we'll start to see some stories show up that were written just for us.

We finished up the first day of reading yesterday. We got through about 30 stories, which is about par for a typical Saturday session. If you sent in a story in the first few weeks of December, you probably have a response by now.

We also did our first podcast. We're new at this, but I think it turned out well. If you have an suggestions about topics you'd like us to cover in future podcasts, please send us an email. Can't guarantee we'll answer every request, but we'll certainly try.

Well, it tried to snow day us again, but it's not too bad, so we're on.

In about 15 minutes or so, we'll start digging through the slushpile looking for stories to print in Tringulation: End of the Rainbow. If you've submitted and were wondering when we'll be getting back to you, there's about a 50% chance you'll get a response today. That's because there are 70 stories in the slushpile, and past experience says that we can get through about 30 in a sitting.

Well, it looks like it's done snowing for the weekend, but it's too late to recover from a missed reading session.

I'm not terribly worried. We're still ahead of schedule compared to last year, but we're going to have one hell of a pile of stories to wade through come the first weekend in January.

Did do some pre-screening of stories yesterday. Nothing much to speak of yet, but I only read a fraction of the 50+ stories that are currently sitting in our slushpile. We'll get caught up pretty quick as long as the weather doesn't thwart us.