And lo, word came down from on high

Or rather, through a blog post. As some of you may remember I had submitted a short story for the anthology “Thunder on the Battlefield.” This was around the beginning of January. I didn’t hear back on if it was received, but I hoped for the best and went back to working on my novel.

A little background, the anthology is being edited by James R. Tuck — author of the Deacon Chalk series. I follow his blog and yesterday he sent out a small update on what he’s been up to. In that update he mentioned they’d chosen everyone for the anthology which will be a two volume set.

Having not heard anything directly, I think I’ll take that as my rejection letter. Which as rejection letters go, I think it’s a pretty unique way to hear about it.

So what’s the next step?

I had to cut the original story down to 10k words. Now that it’s back in my hands so to speak, I’ll go back in and flesh it out to its original story length. Which would have been around 15 to 20k. After that I’ll shop it around again, keeping the 10k version for places that don’t want anything above that. Should I have no takers, I’ll throw it up on Amazon and Smashwords and see how it fares.

In the end, I want to thank James R. Tuck for the chance and putting the anthology together. It gave me the excuse to develop some fun, interesting characters that I can pull out for future work. Good luck with the anthology!