On Hauling Ass

Today, the sun has slowly seeped over the horizon on a morning full of foreboding. Today, I face possibly my biggest challenge to date. Today, the earth will spin in the opposite direction - God willing - so we can meet our deadline.

But enough about work.

"On Hauling Ass". It seems ES and I are chronologically challenged - a fact compounded by us having only one motor vehicle.

Every morning seems to be the same ol', same ol'. It's as if the fates are conspiring against us. Essentially, we're always on time: late. At least we're consistent about it. If we leave early, there will be some yob who's broken down in the middle of a slipway or a Metro pig pen set up between two traffic lights on the busiest road on our route. There's a particular set of lights that's hardly ever working. They only work when we take another route to avoid them, and - on those occassions - it's the lights on the new route that are out.

We've found more backroads to ES' place of employ than there are dust roads in the Free State, but we always seem to be buggered, regardless. So, it's either a porksword who knows nothing about car maintainance, Metro (whose gift of irrational reasoning is fathomless) or the Municipality.

We know it's not us. Heavens no. Why? Well, because on the odd occassion that we're actually late, none of these other problems occur and the route is as clear as the Autobahn.

Go figure.

As for the stories "HC" and "TC", I've submitted them to a pretty cool-looking website for a print magazine in the States: Necrography (just add a dot com and you've got their address: go check them out, although there's no content posted on the site... Obviously, being a print magazine). Their guidelines aren't as specific as some of the other markets I found last night, and their goal is expressed as "looking for promising amateurs".

There's only one thing that bugs me about that.

If you're told you don't fit the publication, despite not having any sort of generic guidelines, that doesn't mean you're not a promising writer. It just means you don't fit. There's a distinct difference between being told the fit's wrong and being rejected on the basis of form (and it's a difference in the publishing community, not one I'm just pulling out my ass here). As they don't specify the content they're looking for, how do they expect authors (promising or not) to guess the fit - because you have to have a sense of cohesion within a publication? You can't put market a CD with Tom Jones, followed by an Eyehategod track, followed by a Bach classic concerto. It'll never sell.

But, actually, I think the assumption is that authors would have access to the publication. I've never seen it in local stores and assume that it's also on a fairly limited print run in the States (otherwise it wouldn't be classified as a small press). Mind you, with a title that means something along the lines of either "Writing about the Dead" or "Writing by the Dead" (in the sense of "Damned"), I don't expect to find it easily. (Maybe I should visit CUM Books? Ha!)

Anyhow, enough about that.

I haven't had any feedback on "Lambs of God" (Pt 1). Should I let it rot in peace? Do the comment thingies on the blog not work properly? Don't know.

If Part 2 even makes it onto my computer monitor, it won't be next week, I'm afraid.

I really want to return to another grissly piece I'm busy with: "The Thing That Should Not Be" (working title based on Metallica's classic, in turn based on the Cthulhu Mythos: Wikipedia it out of interest. It's a bit long to explain here). It started out as a fairly fun, intentionally short short story, but has taken on a life of its own and looks like it wants to be a novellette. And it's gruesome enough to gag a maggot, so, naturally, my interest is definitely tweeked.

I'll probably post again later on in the day.

Have a good one, people.