My First Real Post

Okay, looks like I'll hold off on changing the template for now.

This blog will primarily be focused on my freelance writing, although I'll likely comment a fair bit on politics and maybe religion besides.

Here's the most recent news on the writing front...

I spent Super Bowl Sunday, when not setting up this blog, revising "Melon Heads" and preparing "Picking Up Plans in Palma" for submission.

I originally intended "MH" to be posted on this blog to expose some people to my writing, but then I found an anthology called "Extreme Creatures" on Ralan.com that pays a half-cent per word for thematically-appropriate stories. I don't ordinarily like to send my work to a place paying that little, but something is better than nothing and may story was appropriate for it.

After all, it's based on this urban legend here:

http://www.weirdohio.com/MelonHead.html

I found it when I was a freshman at UGA and figured these fellows would make nice, unique monsters. I've been working on the story for the last 6.5 years now. I think I might have come close to selling an earlier, crappier version to the webzine Feral Fiction, but the webzine failed. I'm now running out of places to send it.

"Picking Up Plans in Palma" is a spy story set in my Afrikaner universe, an alternate-history scenario where the Dutch settle southern Africa 200+ years earlier than our world. The 20th Century is dominated by a Cold War between the US and its allies (Europe, Russia, Australia, some democratic African states) and a gigantic apartheidish entity that includes most of Africa, southern Arabia, India, and much of southeast Asia and its allies (Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, Thailand, and a Sikh state located where Pakistan is in our world). I've got various versions of the timeline on an alternate-history forum I've been a member of since 2001-2002 and maybe I'll link to it here someday.

I've sent "Palma" to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, a new webzine run by John Joseph Adams, the former slush editor at FSF. I got a "didn't work for me" rejection from FSF, which indicates they at least read all the the way through, while Adams said he liked the story but it didn't win him over. He invited me to send him more stuff.

So I sent "Palma" to Analog, which should respond in a month or so. I sent "Coil Gun," another Afrikaner story, to the British magazine Interzone. It's been nearly three months. If they don't respond sooner or later, I'll send it to Lightspeed. It's more overtly SF than "Palma," since it deals with war in space, so maybe Adams will like it.

I'm also going to try to finish my two outstanding fan-fiction projects "Lord of the Werewolves" and the "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Reboot" hopefully in the next few months. I'll probably finish "LOTWW" within the next month or so, since there are only three or four chapters left; "ROTF-R" will take a bit longer, since it's only halfway completed.

Both of them can be found here.

http://www.fanfiction.net/u/1018860/Matt_Quinn

Then I'll be able to focus all of my energy on my original writing projects, including my unfinished steampunk post-apocalyptic Western (try saying that five times fast) "Escape from the Wastelands," which I hope to finish late this year or early next year.

I've added seven pages to it today, mostly in the later phases of the beginning (before the protagonist ends up in the middle of the giant desert by himself, with only nomads and post-nuclear mutants for company).