I finished revising my new story – Bottled Lightning – today and sent it out into the big wide world. I’m pretty happy with it, especially since I really didn’t like the first draft. I read it through for the last time today and I think I managed to whittle it into something I can be proud of – as someone on Twitter pointed out to me over the weekend, you’ll always think you can make something better. Whether or not it’s good enough for publication remains to be seen. I also finished Justin Cronin’s The Passage yesterday. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a vampire apocalypse novel – think zombie apocalypse but with vampires. I enjoyed it and I’ll read the sequel but despite a few unresolved threads I wasn’t so enamored with it that I felt I had to rush out and buy the next one. Instead, I started Caitlin R Kiernan’s latest book, Blood Oranges. I’m a couple of chapters in and enjoying it so far. So much, in fact, that a large portion of this evening will be spent reading. But first, more submissions.