Sublime, Meet Ridiculous

The announcement has gone out all over the place that there's a buying freeze on at Baen's Universe. They've bought an entire year's worth of stories, and still haven't gotten in all the ones they've commissioned. As a result, they've imposed a buying freeze until at least October 1. Which affects me like this:

That leaves the problem of what to do with the stories that were
submitted prior to June 12. What we've decided to do is leave those
stories in the pool for consideration for the second year of the
magazine -- but notify the authors that the delay is likely to be very
long before they receive either an acceptance or a rejection.


This strikes me as rather ironic. "Astromonkeys" took seven hours from submissions to acceptance. A couple of weeks later, the assistant editor said she'd like to see a sequel. I took that as a hint, and seeing as how I'd just written one, I sent it in about a month later. It made its way up to Eric Flint in early December. Now it looks as if it will be close to a year before I get a final decision one way or the other. From the sublime to the ridiculous.

Of course, they say I'm welcome to pull the story at any time. But who else would publish it? Baen's seems like the perfect fit for Digger and his exploits. So I guess I'll let the story sit, but really, it's a bit of a pain. I could really use some writing income to help with this whole "buying a car" tightrope I'm trying to walk.