YIp.  Rah! Yahoo!  Good news the last few days. 

First, my flash magical realism piece, The Moth Collector's Daughter, has been picked up by Sharon Dodge of Reflection's Edge and will be coming out in June or July (not sure which yet).  I so appreciate RE's unique character and Sharon's taste for the unusual.  Reflection's Edge is fast becoming one of my favorite markets.

Second, I got a wonderful e-mail from Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine asking after my fantasy novella, Over the Rim. 

I love Over the Rim- have always been convinced it was a special story, but at just over 10k it has been a hard sell.  Most short story markets have a 6 or 7k cap on wordcount, but many places don't consider 10k long enough to be a novella.  Over the Rim was stuck in the no-man's-land somewhere in the middle.  Two or three editors of various markets have held onto it, commented positively on it, but utlimately passed it over for publication.  That was hard to take. The message was, "This is really good, but we're not going to buy it for reasons other than quality."   

I had begun to despair.  Briefly, I considered self-publishing it, putting it up in serial installments on my LJ.  And that gave me an idea.  The story is very well paced (If I do say so myself), with nice cliff-hanger scene breaks about every 2k.  Maybe, I could market it as a serialized piece. 

I began to look around for markets seeking serialized works.  And that is when I stumbled on an old market blurb for ASIM that said they were seeking short stories that could be serialized.  I don't even know why I hadn't thought of them as a market in the first place.  I love ASIM.  If you don't know, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is a writers co-operative publication out of Australia.  They produce a quality, popular spec fic publication, pay semi-pro rates, and have a sense of humor- something not many markets can truly boast, I'm afraid.  They also have a very open, writer-friendly editorial process.  ASIM is definetly a publication by writers, for writers.  I dream of making something like they have in New Zealand someday. 

So, I sent my serialized Over the Rim to ASIM and immediatley got back an e-mail something like this:

"We don't do serialized stories.  Where did you get that idea?  However, would you like us to consider your story as a stand alone work?"

I explained where I had gotten that idea, and they were appropriately shagrined.  Apparently, the blurb I had found was years old and outdated.  They ran off to update it, and yes, I asked them to consider Over the Rim as a stand alone. 

The story made it quickly through the first two rounds of slush readers and into the pile editors choose from.  I thought that was encouraging.  Then it sat, and sat, and sat, and then I got the dreaded e-mail from ASIM saying "Sorry, no editor had picked this up and we don't hold work longer than three month, so you can submit it elsewhere."  The e-mail did include glowing comments from their first readers.  Again, Over the Rim was well-loved but unsold.  That was at the end of April.

Then yesterday, I got an e-mail from Edwina Harvey.  Edwina is one of the editors of ASIM (they do a rotation of editors) and she bought my story, The Derby, for issue #33- the same story now in the running for the Sir Julius Vogel award. 

Edwina wanted to know if Over the Rim was still availble for issue #42 of ASIM.  Apparently, it had gotten such good reviews by their first readers that it had been a topic amongst the editors.  They had decided to pick it up, and the e-mail releasing it had been sent by mistake.  

So, at last, Over the Rim is going to see real paper.  

Just to whet your appetite here's a little blurb:

Young Mike Abbott's dad is weird with grief.  He seems to have forgotten his son is seventeen, that new puppies and special trips will not remedy the loss of Mike's mother.  When they end up at Crater Lake National Park and Lodge, Mike must take the puppy out in the middle of the night to do its business.  A strange, prophetic sign rises up out of the fog at the trail's edge.  It reads: Warning; Keep animals leashed at all times.  Pets have been known to vanish over the rim.  

And when Mike's puppy dissapears over the rim into the fog, he never intends to go after it.  But it seems that the universe and the strange world nestled outside of time on Wizard Island have other intentions that trump Mike's own.