Watching the Inbox?

I haven't been on here for a few days, so I figured I'd check in. Unfortunately for you literary agents out there, I haven't put a gun in my mouth or swallowed one too many bottles of cough syrup, so you'll just have to wait (like I keep waiting for my ship to come in or sink on the horizon). In the meantime...

Nothing back from Tenth Street yet. Some new contact came out of the mist (like a new Station Chief in Zero Dark Thirty), asking me for a new signed contract for Destroyer with each page initialed. I wondered if that made the contract on The Standard null and void since that's not how that was done. The first guy, Jack, sounded like he didn't have a copy of it anyway. At any rate, I sent it all back, and that was the last I heard from them. It's starting to look like a Publish America non-paying gig at this point anyway, so no use crying over spilled ink.

I also got the 'first round edit' back to Netherworld for Wolf Man, and that was pretty interesting as I'd never gotten feedback from an editor before (or anyone else, for that matter). Outside of some minor tweaks, everything looked good to go except for the climax. The Wolf Man locks the bad guy in a safe where a chemical bomb just went off, and the editor thinks the hero's main squeeze and the undercover cop on the scene should have got wiped out by the fumes too. Hell, I can't do that, that's something Stephen King would have done. Maybe I'll let them get sick before someone finds a miracle cure. It's at the end of the story anyway, so again, no sense crying over spilled anthrax.  

This morning the editor from Torquere came back with the corrections on Stxeamtown, and this could get hairy. She described the heroine as a 'SUPER bland and very manic pixie dreamgirl', and though I can't belabor the point, I'm not sure how I'm going to fix all that. This is about a gang of kids who lived on a rooftop in a post-apocalyptic society, for gosh sakes. I don't know how I'm going to turn her into Bree Brooks from Nightcrawler, but...the editor's always right. I need to get this sorted out by Monday, and time's a-wastin'.

Like I told John Yodice as I put together our science project for our sixth grade class during lunch hour (due that afternoon), I work best under pressure. After all these decades, I haven't changed a bit.