> made the rounds of all the major SF/F short fiction publishers without selling. Two of them are more vignette than short story, and one is just a weird piece that I was really proud of . . . (It also has a glaring logic error that almost sent me into convulsions when it was pointed out to me--I have no idea why I didn't realize it myself, and it would take a fairly major restructuring of the story to fix. I'll leave its discovery as an exercise for the reader should it ever be posted.)

I'm game. Hey, to paraphrase Miracle Max in TPB: "I'm *good* at illogic."


> I'd be willing to post those stories to an "unofficial" page on the RinkWorks server, much like the AGLL page. . . . That keeps the readership to what I think is a small but extremely intelligent and loyal (suckupsuckup) faction of the RinkWorks readership.

Er, which way are we supposed to interpret that? You (Dave) suck up to your loyal sycophants, or WE (the forum) suck up to godlike Dave? Or perhaps it's an exercise in mutual sucking up, eheh.

Iss may or may not want to mutually deplore that idea. :-)

Whatever. To be honest (and here I am not sucking up; or at least, not really) the few snippets of stuff I've read by you have something in common with the tone of Jack Vance's stories, or maybe Timothy Zahn. Have you read that short tale called "They're Made Out of Meat" by Terry Bisson? It was once short-listed for a Nebula. The dialogue ripostes in Duel of the Ages reminded me of "Meat" even though the two stories have nothing to do with each other. What I mean is: your writing there moves along at a pace quite uninterrupted by unusual phrasing or situation. It is what I would strive for in good, fast-paced action.


> I want to be a professional writer, and posting my stories on a web page with advertising banners at the top and a multi-colored logo and all the fanfare of being a RinkWorks feature doesn't strike me as the way to go about it. Self promotion is a necessary evil,

I'm not exactly sure how it works; but if you're good enough, have you and Sam thought of getting an agent to represent your work and get that first, crucial foot stuck inside the publishers' door?


> So, I guess if enough people are interested, I'd be willing to post a few of my better stories to a low-key page. So who's interested? We've already got a poll going for "Who wants to read bad stories?", so now I guess we'll have one going for "Who wants to read OK stories?" :-)

I do! I DO! Pleeeeeeeease.