Quick Turnaround

"Shell" got a super-quick rejection from F&SF. 11 days round-trip by snail mail. It was a John Joseph Adams and not a Gordon Van Gelder (a grading scale introduced to me by M.T. Reiten, who has collected quite a few of his own rejections from them), which means it didn't make the cut to get passed up to the big guy. However, the wording is slightly more encouraging than the first rejection I got from them, so I'm slowly making progress. Maybe in another couple of stories, I can, like Matt, start getting GVG rejections rather than JJA's (which is a small, sad ambition, I know, and yet I've learned to grasp any tiny indication of progress and cherish it as I try to work my way into this business).

In other news, I heard a story on the news the other night about a local highway crash that sounded pretty Darwin-worthy, except that nobody had actually died yet. A woman was in critical condition after being ejected from a vehicle that overturned. The vehicle in question was being driven by the woman's boyfriend and overturned after it tried to pass the vehicle in front of it... on the shoulder... in a CONSTRUCTION ZONE. I've been trying to find a link to the story to see if in fact the overturned vehicle was a pick-up truck, but so far, I have not succeeded.