Hell(yeah!)jack

April 15

Damn, I'm sleepy, so this won't be long.

Mike and I sold our collaborative horror story "Helljack" to issue #1 of H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror. Which is odd, since we submitted it to Weird Tales...

George Scithers (editor at Weird Tales) sent the acceptance, and I asked for clarification... I know John Betancourt (owner of Wildside Press) recently acquired Weird Tales, and Col. Scithers said this new magazine is Betancourt's -- so maybe it's a sister publication to Weird Tales? I dunno. I'll let you know when I do know.

(Update -- pay rates are comparable to those for Weird Tales, but payment comes within 30 days of acceptance (well, return of contract, presumably) rather than on publication. Awesome!)

It's always cool to be in a first issue. Unless the magazine folds before publication. But I think Wildside is doing well enough that that shouldn't be a problem in this case.

(Another Update -- Mike dug through newsgroups and got more details. The magazine is basically a vehicle for Wildside Press ads, but with good fiction -- Betancourt realized that it's actually cheaper for him to put out a magazine than to produce print catalogs regularly. First issue will be out later this year, and it won't be open to submissions for quite a while, it sounds like. Cover of the first issue will be a painting of Cthulhu by Bob Eggleton, which sounds pretty sweet. Whoo!)

So. "Helljack". It's a real horror story -- it's got monsters, entrails on tables, reality bleeding at the edges (actually, reality hemorrhages completely), and a train. My initial idea was to write a story about a train hijacking and demons and stuff. Mike made it much more interesting, and pretty much created our very wicked antagonist on his own. We round-robined the story, each of us writing about half, probably, but we did editing passes with each iteration, so it's all mixed-together at this point, the Pratt & Jasper mingled in a beautiful bloody melange. It's a fun story. It's good to get back to smart splatterpunk sometimes...

Otherwise... Work is work-tastic, yo. We're trying to finish the May issue this week. Busy days. Monday night, we got our mattress delivered, and I huffed and groaned and wrestled the two futons that were previously on the bedframe up the stairs. We finished watching Angel season 1; sigh. Very eager to see the second season. I didn't really begin watching it until last season, so I have a lot of catching up to do... The first night of sleeping on the new bed didn't go well -- I couldn't get comfortable, and Heather tossed and turned a lot, too. We'll get used to it, I'm sure, and it'll be better in the long run.

Didn't manage to write this morning; we both slept so badly that we stayed in bed until the last possible minute. Hope tomorrow will be better.

Words written since February 1, 2003: 31,400

Words written since last entry:
Shup. You're not the boss of me.

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