Month: August 2020

This past week my tickler file reminded me of the submission windows opening for a couple of magazines. For those who don’t follow these dates, there are several magazines that have very specific reading periods throughout the year, and I have a couple of stories that looked a good fit for these publications.

Just to confirm my thinking, I jumped onto the web site of one of the publications and got hit with a large font editorial headline making an extreme political statement. The headline was triggered, I assume by some of the events going on in the world at the moment. Rather than immediately dismiss it, I clicked in and read the full article which reinforced the statement but didn’t offer any solutions, either in the body of the article, or in the recommended links.

It’s easy to condemn and lobby to tear something down, not so easy to come up with a considered solution. The solution might not be perfect, no solution ever is, but the article would, in my mind, have carried more weight had it offered a way forward.

I went on to the submission guidelines page with a small nag of disquiet. One of the first guideline bullet points was authors should not submit stories with any political bias or agenda.

Wait! What?

So the editor can make these statements, but as a writer, I can’t submit a story that makes the same points, or perhaps expresses a different viewpoint?

I’ve given this a lot of thought over the past few days. I still think my story is a good fit for that magazine, and the magazine pays above average rates, but I won’t be sending it to them.

By making the statements on the site, the editor has already politicized the magazine, and telling writers they can’t submit stories with a similar message is, to my mind, just another form of censorship.

On which note, I’ll step down from the soap box and let the next person have their say.

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. Not that nothing has been happening, and while it would be easy to blame COVID, there seem to have been so many things going on, that putting a few paragraphs here has continued to slide down the list.

I watched the launch and splashdown of the SpaceX mission, and openly confess to a lump in my throat at both ends of the mission. I’ll definitely be watching when the next mission launches in September. Another event that didn’t get as much media coverage was comet Neowise, that completed its slingshot around the Sun and is now heading back toward the outer Solar System. As I write this in mid-August, you may still be able to see it in the western sky. I went out a couple of weeks ago and managed to find Neowise through binoculars. It wasn’t as spectacular SpaceX, but impressive all the same.

On the writing front, it’s been a mixed bag. Written words have been much lower than I planned, or wanted, and the Babylon novel is making steady progress, although slower than I’d like. I have a planned publication date, and will let everyone know when it firms up.

Finally, my Babylon short story “Family Harmony” is in the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, available now.