Greetings Loyal Airmen, this week's Flight Log is being recorded a full day early as tomorrow, Friday 14th March, the Air Chief will be at the Knowledge Quest Academy in Milliken, CO giving two presentations on How Comics Books Are Made.  We are told we'll have two audiences, each with approximately fifty students each.  Wow. That is going to be so much.  Hopefully someone will snap some photos and we'll be able to shared them with you here next week.

One of the realities of being a writer is the dreaded rejection notice.  Not everything one writes is going to be accepted and that's a difficult lesson for some young writers to learn.  It can be really disheartening to pour your time, sweat and imagination into a story only to have some editor reject it in the end.  But again, we do not know of a single writer who hasn't amassed a good collection of these pesky things during their careers, primarily during their beginnings in the field.

Yet some people think once a writer has established him or herself, then they never get another rejection slip.  WRONG.  Again, everything one writes is not always going to please the editor it is intended for.  Editors have a tough job, especially those who produce anthologies.  Part of their responsibility is choosing lots of stories that adhere to some set perimeter, are different but again fit together smoothly as a whole.  Recently the Air Chief was invited to submit a story to a Weird Western anthology being edited by a colleague.  Out intention was to deliver to him a short tale in the vicinity of four to five thousand words.  Unfortunately, as often happens with some stories, this one took on a life of its on and wouldn't end in that balloted space.  By the time the Air Chief had wrapped it up, it exceeded 14,000 words.  So even as we submitted it, we realistically knew our chances of selling it weren't high.  And sure enough, this editor rejected it.  Although not for its length, as he explained in his kind letter, but he felt its tone wasn't as “dark” as the other material being turned in.  Because of that, it simply just didn't mesh well with the other entries and so we got a rejection notice.

And let's be real, even though we expected it, that didn't make it any easier to accept.  Oh, not that this tale wouldn't be in this particular anthology, but that no one would get to read it.  Thus for the next few days we scoured the internet in hopes of finding as yet another anthology project that it might be better suited to.  Somewhere along this hunt, we mentioned the situation to our writer pal, Jim Beard.  He surprised us by suggesting, rather than find a book publisher, why didn't we simply put it up at Amazon as an E-Book for their Kindle library.  Having never done anything like that before, the Air Chief went to his pal, Airship 27 Art Director Rob Davis and he readily supported Jim's idea.  To the point of actually doing up a nice cover art image to go with the novella.

Three days later THE WIND UP KIND, a weird western steampunk type novella, appeared at Amazon and an exclusive E-Book for their Kindle Readers.  It sells for .99 cents a download and we hope you'll be curious enough to go to Amazon and give it a look-see.  We particularly love the sketch Rob did up as it totally captures the two main characters perfectly.  It was a really fun story to write and now we hope lots of you Loyal Airmen will get to enjoy it as well.  If you should be so kind as to download it and read it, please do leave us a review.  This is our first ever E-Book and we're anxious to see if we should do more of them.  Thanks ever.

On the more traditional comic front, this past week also saw the Redbud Studio release of RON FORTIER'S TALES OF THE MACABRE # 5.  This one features two stories, THE MONSTER VS THE MACHINE as illustrated by Erik Roman and a World War II spy thriller, LA FEMME LIBERTE…as drawn by John Polacek…as ever both scripts by the Air Chief.   The cover was provided by Rob Davis with colors by Shannon Hall.  The book is available at (www.IndyPlanet.com) and as ever, the Air Chief is having a blast with these.  We hope you are as well.

And that's it for this week, Loyal Airmen.  As ever, thanks for stopping by and we'll see you back here next week.

Ron – Over & Out!