So. I sent short fiction instead of the novel, because there isn’t any fantastic content in the first eight-thousand words, and I’m not sure how well social realism about a mentally ill janitor would go over. Instead, I sent one science fiction story and one fantasy. Neither of them is soul-crushingly bleak or otherwise the obvious product of a diseased mind.

I kept the submissions well under the word count.

I went through the requested laborious process of preparing the manuscripts for email submission.

I enclosed the check.

I kept the cover letter to one page. I did not beg.

Of course I left out an important ‘don’t’ in the cover letter, but hopefully that isn’t a crippling flaw.

So how did I self-destruct on this one? Simple. In reading the instructions for email submissions, I read the very strongly stated request for .rtf files as a request for .txt files.

Repeatedly.

Over a period of days.

I just sent out the properly formatted files. But now I’m wondering what else the evil Sean has done to screw things up for me…

Since then I’ve been thinking that Clarion is probably beyond my physical capacity — six weeks of standing and sitting away from my recliner would likely see me stuck in bed by the halfway point.

But a week? I could handle a week. So I looked at my stories and found one that I really like that’s broken somewhere — around fifty-five hundred words. Now to write a second that’ll fit inside the remainder of the word count…

Thanks for the temptation. It’ll be interesting to see how I blow it this time.