I print rough drafts on the back of old manuscripts, as a way to reuse paper. Last month when I was down at my folks’ house, I brought back several packing boxes full of manuscripts from the unpublished spy novel I wrote senior year in high school / freshman year in college.

Wow–so much has changed since then. I found four or five full copies of the manuscript, the extras made by a copy shop. Many of them were in SASE envelopes sent back from publishers, several with brief comments. Nowadays of course, with laser printers most writers print their own full manuscripts; most send disposable copies instead of paying to get the whole thing sent back in a SASE; and big publishers don’t even take unsolicited subs, let alone hand-scrawl a note on the form rejection.

I also found eight or nine copies of the synopsis and sample chapters, and I read through bits of it all. So much has changed there too. :) The loose omni military-novel POV was pretty rough, the Sans-Serif font was hard to read, and my sample chapters were Ch. 2, Ch. 5, and Ch. 10.

I kept one full copy of everything for sentimentality’s sake, then stacked up the rest in my scrap paper pile. It’s taller than a five-ream box of printer paper, so I think I’ve got about 3000 sheets there. Which should keep me set for printing rough drafts for a long time!

The Fix, an online SF/F review zine from the publisher now behind the British SF/F magazine Interzone, recently posted a review of Weird Tales #347, including my story “Excision.” The review has a brief summation of the story and makes some good general observations, but never expresses a firm opinion one way or the other. The reviewer does call another story “one of the few failures in this issue,” so I’ll go out on a limb and infer that mine was not among them. :)

I got a very nice note recently from Dave Kirtley. Dave and I both attended the Viable Paradise SF/F Workshop in the fall of 2004, but I was a callow rookie with a bloated epic F novel and he was a rising neo-pro with several sales to top mags like Realms of Fantasy. He’s continued to sell at that level, and I’ve finally broken through with my recent story in Weird Tales.

Dave saw the Table of Contents for that WT issue and remembered me, and sent me a nice congratulatory note. I hope he gets a chance to read the story, but it was still very cool to be remembered after three and a half years. Thanks, Dave!

I received a phone call today from a nice administrator lady at the Writers of the Future contest. I have been named one of eight Finalists, for the First Quarter of 2008. (The formal announcement will appear on their blog.) The eight Finalists’ stories, I’m told, will be sent to the external judges, the famous-name writers. Then the First, Second, and Third Place stories will be announced in mid-March.

I’m delighted to have made it this high in the contest. I happen to know, through various writing workshops, three of the twelve place-winners from last year: Andrea Kail, Aliette de Bodard, and Kim Zimring. The high quality of their fiction leads me to suspect that all the Finalists’ stories must be quite good, but I think mine is damn good too. So, into the breach!