... 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.

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.

If you've written fiction and tried selling your work, you're familiar with the level of rejection that's involved. A hard-working author will spend years trying to sell a story, constantly getting rejection after rejection. Most of these rejections are of the "form" variety, which basically say "We aren't interested in buying this."

Some editors and publications, however, send personally written rejections -- ones that take a sentence or three to say why the story wasn't purchased.

This is the second Saturday I've spent with Pete Butler and the other two assistant editors, grinding through the slush pile to find stories for Triangulation: Taking Flight. I've already learned a lot about what it's like to be on the other side of the editor/writer wall. Here are some thoughts to help writers come up with stuff that we'll like. I expect that a lot of these points apply to getting your work accepted by most markets:

Pittsburgh Worldwrights is looking for writers.

Worldwrights is a "critiquing group", which is to say that we're a group of writers who aspire to be better writers, and thus submit our work to each other for suggestions on how to improve our writing and storytelling.

The group has lost of few members recently, and is looking to restaff a bit. The magic number seems to be around 10 people, which means we could use 4 more right now to hit the sweet spot.

Triangulation: End of Time hit she shelves about a month ago. Click on the link and buy a copy.