In spite of spending half her life in hospital out and in patients, travelling there and back and in pain at home, M Kenyon Charboneaux, tutor and writer of horror stories in the USA, took time out to read my Exit, Pursued by a Bee. I am overwhelmed by her review here >> http://geoffnelder.com/kenyon.htm

I am also grateful to an energetic and highly intelligent forum member, who audaciously calls herself ~bintarab (note the tilde), who meticulously nitcombed the text of Exit, Pursued by a Bee recently and passed onto me a list of errors. Some of them were subjective alternative comma usages and capitalization of military ranks, but much was correcting my awful French. Not that Exit is bilingual but I wrote the occasional mon cherie, as spoken by Claude, a French Canadian astronaut, and ~bintarab corrected it to ma cherie. (not sure how to do the accent in here – when I tried a few minutes ago I lost all this text and found myself playing a Lara Croft type game!. The upshot is that I was able to correct a galley proof of Exit, Pursued by a Bee for DDP to create a full-blown trade paperback version instead of the experimental but readable version at Lulu.com. Thanks ~bint!

All this euphoria was grounded this morning with the incoming real life post. I had a rejection for Auditory Crescendo today from Interzone.
Form rejection of the worst kind, IMHO. No explanation, no signature so I don’t know who read it. In the envelope – MY envelope with MY stamp – were adverts for the publishers other mags, the form reject, and another advert and urging for all submitters to buy and read Interzone. No wonder they don’t like responding by email and have only a tiny window for email subs: they use our envelopes and stamps to post their adverts to us. I wouldn’t mind so much but as I said in my query letter, I’ve subscribed to Interzone since it started.

I know for a fact that they are not deluged with submissions and even if they were I’m sure most submitters would prefer to wait another week and have a few words such as, pace too slow in the middle, characters 2D, already received alien abduction story this year, had too many man bites vampire tales…

I know that some editors fear a reprisal in the way of a prolonged discourse but I bet that rarely happens.

At Escape Velocity we always give a couple of sentences feedback with rejections and as a former leche oops, lecturer, I always find something positive to say. After all it takes at least 20 mins to read and consider a short story. It only takes another one minute to write a response, unless I get carried away and do a full crit

I’ve sent it to Asimov’s. Wish it luck.