Meanderings: March 11, 2000

Saturday,
March 11, 2000

The Gods do indeed smile upon fools and little children. Got a ding from Amazing Stories -- apparently they're way backlogged with unsolicited stuff. I have more to say about this, but first, I have a request for any of you nice pipples currently in the States -- when I submit a story to an American publisher, I have to include a self-addressed stamped envelope for their reply. The problem is the stamps -- I can include International Reply Coupons, of course, but these are buggering expensive and a bit of a pain to procure. It's much easier to slap some American stamps on the reply envelope and pop that in with the story.

Which leads me to the problem of actually getting ahold of the stamps. I have a book of first-class stamps from my last trip, but they're running out and I didn't think to ask Lyndon to pick up another book when he was in Boston. Besides which, it takes three stamps to get a letter to Europe, and I'm pretty sure the actual cost is less than the price of three stamps. Sooooo, the next time one of you lovely people need to go into the Post Office for something, could you ask the nice postal worker how much it costs to send an average letter (usually 20g) from America to Europe? And if you happen to have enough spare cash on you, could you pick up 10 or so of these stamps for me? I will, of course, reimburse all costs, and I'll name a character after you out of sheer gratitude. Thank you!

And now, on with our entry and Amazing Stories. The ding letter essentially said that due to a humongous backlog they can't consider any unsolicited manuscripts and are returning them all. The exception to this policy is "writers with significant credentials in the science fiction field. We still want to see material from anyone who's a member of SFWA and anyone who has had work publiched in a professional SF magazine. If you believe that your experience as a writer qualifies you as someone with significant credentials, please don't hesitate to show us an example of your work."

A-ha, a-hahahahahahaha. Yes, I'm not surprised that they're getting overloaded with unsolicited MSS, considering their attitude towards grabbing e-rights in perpetuity. Few people who want to retain reasonable e-rights to their work (e.g. your average clued-in pro) will submit anything to AS or anything produced by Wizards of the Coast until they change this attitude. Of course, I'm a flaming idiot and had completely forgotten about the DRAGON thing until I looked at the bottom of the ding letter and saw their query email -- amazing@wizards.com.

Okay, so I'm an idiot. At least someone up there is looking out for me -- this is one rejection I'm quite happy to have.

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