Yay!

Luckily, the waiting is over. The first chapter of Ziggy is sold as a short story. I made the changes I offered, and that was it. More details when I get them....

good news and bad news

Well, it's been pretty okay for the week. It's Tuesday and I sold chapter one of Ziggy to an anthology. True, it's only for 25 bucks and a free book. But that's okay. I assume somebody will read it.

Now the bad. The editor emailed me within about a half hour of my accepting and asked me if this was about the "real" Ziggy Stardust. If so, they can't print it because they would be sued. I'm not sure that's true, but I didn't argue. I simply explained, that, no, it's not about Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars from the album. Here are the differences. You know, my Ziggy's from 83, not 73, he's from Ann Arbor, not London.... He's not spreading the false message of peace from space aliens and the audience doesn't kill him. And certainly not all in the first chapter of the book. Then I changed the name of the band from "The Spiders" to Black Light. Lame, I know. Sorry. Then I took out Ziggy's last name, and changed Gillli's to Ronnie. Yep. Blick. But I'm desperate not to be unpublished. What should I do about the book? Is this the way it's going to go now? I'm really happy that somebody wanted the story. In less than 24 hours, no less. Very nice. But now I don't want it to fall apart because of missconceptions..... The truth is I wrote the book because I missed the '80's. Still do. I wrote the book because I spent so much time lying on my bed staring at the liner notes on albums sleeves, memorizing, and letting the lyrics make up stories in my head. I wrote the book because of Asia, and because I know there are other people out there like him, and I want them to read it. It's the kind of book I really wanted when I was a kid. That's all.