Well, I was right on the money. I got exactly what I was expecting, for the most part. If some of you will recall (though, if you do, I tend to wonder just how much time you're spending reading about my life when you have your own to live), I sent my first story submission out to a magazine some weeks ago. When I sent it out, I was totally expecting it to get rejected. I understand (and still do) that first-time authors rarely get their first submissions published, that getting rejected a few times is kinda like a proving ground.
Well, it did get rejected.
But, man, it was worth it.
Dear Mr. Seals,
Many thanks for giving me a look at 'Jumper,' but I'm going to pass on this one. I enjoyed the story- it moves along nicely and Wolf's character comes through the interview well, but in the end, I just didn't feel this one was right for us, alas. Thanks anyway for sending it along, and best luck to you with it.
Yours,
Gordon Van Gelder
Editor/Publisher
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
So, yes, it got rejected, but it wasn't at all bad. As a matter of fact, I'm kinda inspired by it- he didn't even have any criticisms or red-marks. The manuscript came back to me as pristine as it was when I sent it out, which is rather remarkable, IMHO. That's a subtle hint to me, I think, that there is nothing inherently wrong with the story itself, or even the writing. This supposition is encouragement for me to just send the story out to another magazine in the hopes that it'll get picked up elsewhere. In the meantime, I think I'm going to send a different story to FSF-Mag. If "Jumper" wasn't right for them, perhaps I might have another one which would be. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." And, in the final analysis, I did succeed. I'd set out upon this endeavour with the intention of "earning myself some rejection notices." Well, I won the booby prize, I guess.
Next on the list of magazines I want to submit to... Analog: Science Fiction and Fact. I'll keep you posted.
In other news, I finally learned how to render crisp and clear pictures with 3D Studio Max. I'd been having problems with that, you see. Every time I rendered a picture, it looked great in the MAX render-shade window, but whenever I exported it to JPG, it came out blurry. So I sprouted a brainstem (with some guidance from Scifi-Meshes.Com) and exported to BMP instead. The BMP is photo-quality, perfectly clear and so crisp I could practically see the volume of space. So I dragged the BMP into Photoshop, exported to JPG and it came out perfectly, no loss whatsoever. This, my friends, makes me a very happy camper indeed.
Here's the URL to the pic I did today, if you're interested:
http://www.nightshade-ink.com/homebnd2.jpg
Note to editors: that link is to my personally owned domain, which will be around for a long, long time to come- it's safe as kittens.