Back in June, when I was finishing up the second draft of SENTINEL, I decided to go out on a limb and submit a short story I'd written to Strange Horizons. I'm not a short story writer by any means. I'd written that one to submit to the WD Short Story Contest the year before, but I'd chickened out. But it's cute and funny, so I thought, what the hell?

That was June 8th. The magazine's guidelines say they take no longer than 70 days to review submissions and the average response time is four weeks. Well, we've passed right on by the four-week mark a couple of weeks ago. I'm trying my best not to read anything into it. Hell, for all I know, their rejection got caught in my Gmail spam filter—which I just discovered the existence of last week. Anything sitting there for 30 days gets deleted automatically...but their confirmation of submission e-mail didn't get caught in the filter, so I don't think follow-up correspondence would.

Anyway, this whole waiting around thing is nerve-wracking. I know it's only going to get worse as I submit my novel(s) to agents...

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TOPAZ status: FINALLY past Chapter 17. Lots of repercussions to deal with in subsequent chapters too. Should be fun!