End of the Rainbow

I’ll try to make this short since it’s midnight and I have school tomorrow.  We open late, but we’re scheduled to go.

My biggest paying sale to date (crosses fingers for WotF) was to Triangulation 2004, a semipro anthology put out by the PARSEC, a sci-fi organization out of Pittsburgh.  It was something like 84 bucks.  Woohoo.  Since then, Asimov’s has started saying very nice things about them.  (No, to my knowledge they never reviewed my issue.)  The theme for the 2004 issue was “Hard Port”, which wasn’t a stretch for my space fuel tanker story, “Chasers”.

This year’s anthology has the theme “End of the Rainbow”.  After a little dictionary and thesaurus time with the word “rainbow”, I came up with a story idea.  What’s more, I’ve now written almost a thousand words for the opening scene.  (I hope my other story doesn’t develop abandonment issues.)

Competition for the anthology is probably a lot stiffer than it used to be.  The theme used to be very loose, really just a carryover from their con-related fiction contest.  Now anthology and contest have different themes (contest theme: The Color of Silence) and the good press surely brings in lots of hopefuls.  Still, I’m inspired to give it a try.

The one reservation I have is, what do I do with the story if it doesn’t make it?  It won’t be right for WotF since the speculative element isn’t even hinted at until the bottom of page two and still hasn’t been expressed explicitly a thousand words in.  I guess I can make rounds at the regular zines, but I might have to strip the story of its rainbows so it won’t look like a failed anthology piece.  The rainbow connection will be a little tenuous despite it being the inspiration for the story.  But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

I’m just happy t be working on a story that has some momentum.  I don’t expect this one to get long enough to bog down.  And I have an outline.  Anyway, I’m off to bed to dream of sci-fi rainbows and unruly math students.

[I’ll add some links tomorrow]