Well, I bitched so much about the frustrating thing in today's mail in the last entry that it seemed worth mentioning this too.

This summer, I made a point of getting books signed by all of the writers teaching at Clarion West as momentos, but I missed Nalo Hopkinson, since when I left East Lansing for Seattle I accidentally stuffed someone else's copy of "Brown Girl in the Ring" into my suitcase. So a few weeks back when Nalo said on her blog that she was selling old surplus copies of the book, and when purchasing you had the option of requesting a signed copy, I jumped on it. Months after her week at the workshop I wasn't even sure she'd connect the name on the paypal form, but I figured it'd be nice to have anyway.

It arrived in the mail today, signed, "To Ben Burgis; a fellow appreciator of the Iliad. Nalo Hopkinson."

Which was an extremely nice thing to see and, despite everything else, made me feel really good this afternoon.

#

Oh, and on the same subject, "Sing, Goddess" has been out at Strange Horizons for 45 days and counting, so we're officially getting into finger-crossing, wood-tapping territory. (They took 56 days to reject "Testing Day," which ended up being the most positive rejection I'd ever gotten from a pro-market, but everything else I've ever submitted there they've always gotten back to me on within a month.) Melding personal rejectomancy with my reading of their stated editorial proccess, I think the way it works is that if the editor initially randomly assigned to reading it gives it an outright "no," so it doesn't go to anyone else, they get back to you within about 30 days. If its longer than that, that probably means that the editor who took an initial look gave it a "maybe" or a "yes," in which case it takes longer because the other editors have to read it and vote on it. That whole second-tier proccess can take up to 70 days from the time of initial submission.

Of course, rejectomancy is a silly business. Really, what can you do other than make the story as good as you possibly can in the first place and then submit it as many places as possible? No point worrying about and over-interpreting something you can't control, right?

Good thing I don't do irrational stuff like that.