Guys, I won’t be coming to the National Convention after all. It’s all a matter of money. It would have cost me about $1,600 to go, and I was ready to spend it too, but something much more urgent has come up and I need that $1.6K elsewhere.
Feel free to beat me up about it. I’m feeling miserable and impoverished and pissed off enough, but if you’d like to kick me while I’m down, well, I probably deserve it.
To make matters worse, I’ve had three short stories rejected this week and two more agents have turned me down. I also had a letter from Bernadette who seems to have taken another look at TimeSplash! (which is extremely good of her, of course) and wanted to let me know she really, really doesn’t want it – because of its ‘edge of violence’ which she thought didn’t suit Orbit’s list. (Hang on a minute, who publishes the insanely violent Peter F. Hamilton? Hmmm, I thought so!)
Depressing as this is, several of these rejecters went to great lengths to tell me how much they liked my writing. (One with almost embarrassing hyperbole, viz. “One of the great measuring metrics of an artist’s skill is his ability to not only conceive of imaginative and creative work, but his ability to convey them to a reader. In that, Mindrider is a spectacular success.” and “The writer is definitely talented and skiled; most of the suggestions that I make here are really a matter of fine-tuning an already exquisite piece of storytelling machinery…” So that’s nice, I suppose. I wonder what they say if they actually like your stuff 
Anyway, I ramble. I just wanted you to know I’d be joining Terry on the benches.
Graham.
