Saturday, July 13, 2013

The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine

My short story "The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine" is going to be published in The Big Pulp (available in print and various e-reader formats.

The bad news is that it won't be appearing until May 2014. Unless one of my pending submissions comes through the publication process more quickly, I'll be on track to publish approximately one story per year. My total published output will come to about 6,000 words. At this rate, I may have enough out there to fill a slender, 150-page collection by the time I'm 63. Awesome!

Writing is easy; publishing is hard.

I had actually thought this would be one of my more difficult stories to place. It features Maine cuisine, wars coming home, fathers and sons who don't get along very well, rare psychiatric ailments, French, a soupçon of possible time travel, and a lot of blood. Yet Big Pulp was only the second venue to whom I submitted it. Other stories that I thought would be easier to place are still languishing.

I know what I like to read, and I know what I am capable of writing, and more often than not the latter overlaps with the former. But getting a bead on the market for short fiction, that is a skill I am still developing.

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