Good news for the new year:  Mad Scientist Journal accepted my story “Evolutionary Tendencies Observed in the Callentradian Snare.”  

Publication date is TBA.  I’ll announce here as soon as I know.

I’m grateful to editors Jeremy Zimmerman and Dawn Vogel for helping me start 2013 off on a positive note.

About the story:  it’s a flash piece so I won’t say too much, just that I had a first person character/narrator bumping around in my head, but I didn’t yet have a story.   I discovered Mad Scientist Journal while pondering Duotrope’s responses.  I bopped around the site for a bit reading the “scientific papers by mad scientists” and noting some familiar author names.

The idea of writing such a piece sounded like much good fun, so in the spirit of mad science, I decided to embark on an experiment.  Not all experiments end so well, but within a short time I had free-associated myself into the notion that my orphan character/narrator was in fact a scientist.  And that his own brand of madness had visited him.

The “mad” twist threw the switch on my nascent idea and the story rumbled to life.  Thanks again to Jeremy and Dawn.

I suppose there’s a lesson in here somewhere under the heading “writing for [a particular] market.”