Bits and Bobs

Just about completed the first draft of A, T, C & G - which, as expected, is around 10,000 words. So not really a short story. Hopefully this will reduce down nicely to around 7,500. My plan is to get it ready for submission by Christmas and then send it to a few choice SF magazines. The first one to try will be Interzone, a market I've submitted to four times with no success. Most recently I sent them Live from the Continuing Explosion about which they said :

Everyone liked it, but in the end we decided we should pass, sorry. Please don't feel too bad, it's a good story and was a near miss

Which cheered me up a little at the time. This story, incidentally, eventually found a happy home in Albedo 1.

I also Sent Seek Alternative Route off to Short FICTION. We shall see. Realist short stories though : apparently no-one reads them.

I also found a review of one of my stories that I hadn't harvested from the net before. The story in question is Good Vibrations, another SF story and one that I am very fond of. It was published in 1999 by Kimota, a magazine that is now sadly no more than a quantum echo drifting through deep space. The review said :

Good Vibrations by Simon Kewin is a wonderfully, almost surreal choice nibble which explores the pursuit of music through the universe and takes the music hunter to realms not thought possible. A great issue of Kimota I think. Very cool.

Good Vibrations is another story, like A, T, C & G as it happens, that mixes future SF and present-day pop music. Not sure why this is such an appealing theme, but it is one I seem to return to quite often. If you fancy reading Good Vibrations, it's in the archive section of my main web site.