The time between Christmas and New Years is typically a lull, with few writerly news to report, good or bad. This year my holiday week has been a busy one:
* I received word that my space opera adventure story “The Dragon Ships of Tycho” has been accepted into an anthology it was written for. This was the first time I was invited by an editor to submit something for an upcoming project. I was flattered, and did my best to come up with a quality story that would suit the anthology theme. I submitted in October and received a positive response this week. I can’t share the details, as this anthology has not been officially announced yet by the publisher – but it will be a physical book and it will likely be released in 2012.
* “The Skeptic” will be reprinted in the January issue of Bent Masses. This was the first story I wrote once I decided to take up fiction, and my first story accepted for publication. Originally it appeared at Absent Willow Review – an online magazine that recently closed its doors. They took down all their content, so “The Skeptic” isn’t currently available online. Bent Masses will kindly fix that on January 15.
* Christine Amsden, author of SF novel “The Immortality Virus” and other speculative works, published a mini-review of my DSF story “Spidersong” on her blog. She called Spidersong “satisfyingly creepy.” You can read her blog post here.
* I’m very nearly done with “Requiem for a Druid” – my second Conrad Brent yarn. At 6300 words, it’s the longest story I’ve written to date. This is an urban fantasy featuring lots of action, magic, plot twists and horrible puns I shouldn’t be able to get away with. At one point I actually have Conrad utter the phrase “These aren’t the druids you’re looking for.” With the wavy hand motion, and everything. Special thanks to authors Ken Liu, Michael Haynes and Victoria Jakes, as well as a number of my non-writing friends, who all pitched in offering critiques on the story and catching my many embarrassing typos. I hope to send “Requiem” out on submission by early next week. It should be my first W1S1 submission of 2012!
The year is almost out and I’m planning to do a blog post analyzing my annual submission statistics, but every one of the remaining few days counts and 2011 isn’t over quite yet. There are approximately 20 stories out on submission at the moment, and it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that I will still hear back about one or more of them before January 1st.
Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction 
Congrats on meeting your W1S1 goals for the year! I look forward to being a part of the community with you in the new year. 🙂