Not Writey Tighty?

It's funny how the old adage "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't" gets hammered home repeatedly when you're a writer. Doesn't matter if you're a newbie, a semi-newbie like myself or even an established writer, we all have come across items/companies that on the surface, look to be good/legit, but upon further research, really aren't.

This particular point was reaffirmed over this past weekend when I decided to dig a little deeper about a particular publisher that I had recently queried and submitted to. The trigger mechanism? A rather quick response to my query and a promise of response in four to six weeks.

So I checked out the publisher, which I had found listed at Duotrope, at a website called Preditors & Editors, and sure enough they had popped up as a vanity publisher. For a brief moment, I thought that this couldn't be right, so I dug a little deeper on the publisher's website and was able to turn up something that led me to believe that the Preditors & Editors website is correct.

Disappointed that one of my leads turned out to be a dud (again), I nevertheless have created a response to them should they deem my manuscript "acceptable" enough to make an offer:

Thank you for your offer, but I must decline as I've decided to go in another direction with my novel.

Now even though this puts me back at square one with the submission process, the writing news isn't all that grim for my novel.

This past Sunday I started the process of doing another round of editing and implementing the solid feedback that was given to me from the publisher that I had written about a week ago. Hopefully when all is said and done, the manuscript with be tight enough to submit for reconsideration to that same publisher.

I also took the liberty of writing a brief memo explaining in concise detail what changes either were or were not done to the manuscript.

As for my other writing project, I've made some great headway with it. I'm at the final climatic scene, and because I'm armed with the knowledge of knowing where I want to go with this and how exactly I want it to end, I should be able to wrap this up another week or two once I get back to it.

When all is said and done, it should crap out at under 80 pages/40k words, which is something I'm actually quite proud of, because the last new story I'd managed to complete prior to this novella was in fact Line 21 in the spring of 2011.

With that being said, where did I put that c.d. of mine?