Novelette The Garden Accepted Into The Great Void

Attached is a 10,000 word submission, “The Garden,” about a mysterious garden in northern Massachusetts which conceals a cutting edge experiment in bio-chemistry.  An edited version has been printed as a chapbook (now out of print), by Damnation Books in 2009, with reprint rights in my possession.  I hope you will be able to use it in UNREAL and, either way, will look forward to your report and any comments.

So went my cover letter to Aditya Deshmukh and Great Void Books for the anthology UNREAL.  The call had been for Speculative Fiction.  Mix of genres is okay as long as the speculative element remains the main element.  Word count was 4,000 to 15,000 and, whi[image error]le no previous publication was preferred, reprints would be considered.  The story itself, “The Garden,” a bit of both, originally published in a version edited more heavily than was to my taste (cf. picture below in center column) but now out of print, but what I would send would be (with one change which had been by me), the original version.

Then yesterday, Monday, came the reply:  I really enjoyed reading “The Garden.”  At first, the story seemed to have real world elements and I wasn’t really hooked until the nematode part.  The ending blew me.  The plot develops slowly but the end is really well done.

Congratulations!  I’m accepting “The Garden” for UNREAL.  Will send you an email regarding the details next month.

So there it is, the second acceptance for December (the first, a flash vampire piece for Black Hare Press’s LUST, see December 8), and not a bad run-up to the Christmas season.