The Rucker Report: Week 4, 2015 – Becoming More Submissive

It’s been a few weeks since the Ruckster has posted one o’ these writing updates, but I promise I’ve been busy tending to many things writing, and…Hello. Greetings from the snow-sprinkled lands of Central Indiana.

So Operation: Remember Me? is truly underway here in the year 2015. Three weeks in the can and I’ve submitted three offspring of literary works, though, to be fair, two of those were not what we in the, ahem, industry would call submissions on spec.  And I’ve already rescinded one of those, a flash fiction (I have different plans for it), so left remaining is the first online publication of the poem “Dream a Little Scream of Me”, the dark poem originally published in Dreams and Screams in 2010 as the intro to the antho. It’s now available to read at QuarterReads, and for the very small token of a mere quarter, you can actually read the thing, if you’re so kind and inclined.

As for the third piece, it’s never seen the light of publication, its only daylight being that it was posted in one of the private virtual offices at the Zoetrope Virtual Studio some five years back. Side note: someday I’ll get tired of saying things happened years ago, but, then again, I suppose it’s better to have experience to which to refer to, than having none at all. So I guess I’ll zip it on that. At any rate, I don’t have a stated timeframe on when I can expect to hear back on this particular submission, though I have a feeling it will be soonish. Details as they emerge.

I say all of the above to say that it’s time I become more submissive, meaning I need to be submitting works, old and new, to promising new and untapped literary markets. Part of that package deal is also anticipating and rolling with rejection, recovering from it and pushing onward still. This, of course, is in conjunction with the other crucial part of Operation: Remember Me? which is the self-publishing and digitization of out-of-print works that are in danger of being long lost and forgotten. A listing of those works are as follows:

• “Pieces of Candice” (horror)
• “All Things Considered” (literary)
• “Shard” (horror)
• “On Shadowy Ground” (YA horror)
• “Finder Kept” (dark fantasty/sci-fi)
• “The Underneath” (bizarro horror) – see the recently designed cover for that one here
• “All in a Day’s Work” (bizarro humor)
• “Call of Duty: A Cop’s Tale” (suspense)

Of course, there’s a handful of other works primed for submission, or nearly so. Conversely these are dwarfed by the number of works-in-progress, but that’s a good ‘problem’  to have for a working, progressive-minded author.

In other current events, I have taken the initial steps in launching a new pen name for the more feminine and sensual leanings of my muse. I will probably keep that particular pseudonym anonymous for a minimum of a year, maybe more. It’s an experiment and the outcome of it is something I have a strong belief in. Launching it involves setting up social networking profiles, a blog and the like. It will be weird operating in that kind of duality, but one must do what one must. Among all that will be continued cover design work for the coming e-books on Smashwords (for me and ‘her’) and another pass at configuring this here website to make into what it ultimately needs to be, despite certain limitations.

And now I suppose I should get back to juggling all of my spinning plates.

Until next time…Be well. Be merry. Be better.

– BLR

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 Recently

READ: Lazarus #14, various short stories

WATCHED: Gotham, Sleepy Hollow, Constantine, Guardians of the Galaxy

LISTENED: London Grammar, Daughter, Sean Lennon, Angus & Julia Stone