Acceptance Notes – No.2 in a series

Following hot on the heels of no.1 in the series, here’s no.2!

Edoardo,

We would like to publish your story, “The Dream of the Night-Shift Power Worker”, in Daily Science Fiction.  We’ll email a contract to you shortly for your approval. A sample email, including any edits to your story that may be necessary, will come later.  The edits will be sent with enough time for your feedback, so we may resolve any issues and present the best possible story to our audience.

Acceptance Notes – No.1 in a series

It’s been a long, lean period, so this email was really welcome!

Dear Edoardo Albert,

Thank you for sending us “Neighbour From Hell.” We love it and would like to publish it in the Trust and Treachery Anthology. We will be in touch in a few weeks with details and to discuss the editing process. In the meantime, please confirm receipt of this letter and send us a short bio (150 words or less) so we can post it on our website.

Thanks again, and we look forward to working with you!

Rejection Notes – No.4 in a series

Dear Edoardo Albert,

Thank you for sending us “The Dream of the Night-Shift Power Worker”. Unfortunately we will not be able to use this work. We receive many well-written, compelling, stories, but can only take a very limited number due to constraints of space and style. We wish you the best of luck in placing your story elsewhere.

P.S. It was a pretty good story. Sorry to say no. This is not our customary rejection.

CS Lewis on Writing

Also from the excellent Inklings blog:

I am sure that some are born to write as trees are born to bear leaves: for these, writing is a necessary mode of their own development.  If the impulse to write survives the hope of success, then one is among these.  If not, then the impulse was at best only pardonable vanity, and it will certainly disappear when the hope is withdrawn.

C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves,
The Letters of C.S. Lewis, (28 August 1930)
I have, I think, gone past the hope of success.

Lewis and Clarke

That’s CS Lewis and Arthur C Clarke, rather than the American explorers. The two of them corresponded and met once. Clarke wrote:

“Less sympathetic to our aims was Dr. C. S. Lewis, author of two of the very few works of space fiction that can be classed as literature -– ‘Out of the Silent Planet’ and ‘Perelandra’. Both of these fine books contained attacks on scientists in general, and astronauts in particular, which aroused my ire. I was especially incensed by a passage in ‘Perelandra’ referring to ‘little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs’…

An extensive correspondence with Dr. Lewis led to a meeting in a famous Oxford pub, the Eastgate… Needless to say, neither side converted the other. But a fine time was had by all, and when, some hours later, we emerged a little unsteadily from the Eastgate, Dr. Lewis’ parting words were, ‘I’m sure you’re very wicked people – but how dull it would be if everyone was good’. ”

H/T: The Inklings blog.

Deep Time

Writing the chapter on the geology of Northumbria, it’s apparent that the reaction of 19th-century geologists against ideas of catastrophism went far too far. Yes, many processes occur constantly and gradually, but the history of the earth in general and Northumbria in particular is punctuated by catastrophic events: most recently the tsunami unleashed by the Storegga Slides, when huge sections of the continental shelf off Norway slid into the abyssal depths and set off giant waves down the east coast of Britain in 6100BC.

Wine Whine

Why has the alcohol content of wine increased so much? 13%, 14%, even 15%. If I want to drink sherry, I’ll buy sherry, I don’t want it foisted on me in an ordinary bottle of wine.