I quickly added two more rejections for my short story I'm shopping around. The last rejection came with the feedback that while it was a good idea, "the start is way too dull and clunky compared to the rest of it". Sigh. Well, I think I'll put it up on the WD Critique Central Forum for some more thoughts.

And speaking of the WD Forum...the SF/F group recently held a contest, purely for fun. We had to take two very different visual prompts (a rogue-type character in front of a door embossed with dragons) and a black hole, and combine them into a story of no longer than 4000 words.

My first attempt seemed too unoriginal, so I wrote a second story after deciding to incorporate the dragon element. I figured that no one else would have noticed the dragons...

Yeah. I was wrong about that. Most of the eleven stories submitted had dragons.

My story, The Guardian's Treasure, came in second. Yay! That was nice after getting three rejections for another story. I think I'll polish up Guardian and try to find a home for it.

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TOPAZ status: Working on Chapter 19. My original version seemed too much like a Q&A session, but I think I've tamed it down a little.