Book Review: Aurora: Pegasus

This is the second book in Amanda Bridgeman’s Aurora Series and picks up the story where book one, Aurora: Darwin, left off. Where Aurora: Darwin was good, Aurora: Pegasus is better, mostly.

Amanda has developed as a writer from book one to book two. From the beginning the story telling feels tighter and cleaner. She builds more depth into her established characters and introduces the new ones seamlessly. She builds great tension, writes good action scenes and has well written plot twists. The old antagonist returns with a new depth and greater agenda. The story’s main conflict is played out and resolved in such a way that leaves the reader both satisfied and wanting more.

Sadly, the book does not concluded well, unlike book one. In book one the aftermath of the main conflict between the crew of the Aurora and their enemies on the Darwin was well handled and the book maintained a good pace and tone right to the end. However, I found the last section of Pegasus a bit of a plod. It felt to me like it was just marking time or just padding out the book so it was a certain length. I kept wondering if something else was going to happen, but it didn’t.

Aurora: Pegasus is still a great book. I spent most of the book thinking this is better than the first, which I loved.

This is a series worth getting into. Book three, Aurora: Meriden, is due out on the 11 of September. I recommend that you buy and read books one and two to be ready for book three. I’m certain this series is only going to get better.

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Positive Rejections

I've just received another short story submission rejection. So it's now two rejections and one acceptance out of the four submissions I've recently made. One out for three is not to bad and if it becomes two out of four (50% success) I'll be very happy.

Although I am getting a fairly large number of rejections, there is a positive spin to them. Most of my rejections this year have come with a please submit again comment of some kind.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

• I appreciate your interest in our Magazine* and hope that you'll keep us in mind in the future.
• We hope you continue to submit to our Magazine* in future and I wish you all the best with your publishing endeavours.
• We encourage you to submit to our Magazine* again.
• Thanks again for submitting to us, and we hope to hear from you in the future.
• In any case I hope you'll consider subbing again because your story was head and shoulders above a lot of other submissions.
• Please feel free to submit other work in the future.

I've been told, and believe, that editors/publishers usually mean it when they say please try again. So, the fact that I'm getting a lot of these must mean that I'm on the right track. All I've got to do now is right the stories so I can submit them.

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*I've taken out the name of the magazine.

One out of Two with Two too go!

I recently made the unprecedented, for me, move of submitting four short stories (two are really flash fiction) at once to different markets. I usually only able to handle doing one at a time.

I've heard back from two already and have one acceptance and one rejection.

The acceptance is my flash story, 'A Matter Og Technique'. I wrote this story back in 2012 and entered it in the short story contest at the Sydney FreeCon. I got seventh place. Anyway, I've been wanting to see it in print somewhere else for a while. It will now be appearing in issue 194 of the Webzine AntipodeanSF in August.

The rejection was of the first short story in ever wrote, and it is it's seventh rejection. The publication that rejected it this time was kind enough to send me the feedback comments from it's readers. Both really liked the start, thought the middle was weak and, therefore, felt the ending didn't work. Which is similar to comments I've received from other rejections.

It's a 'therefore' because I'm fairly sure that the middle is the problem. So, I'm going to rip it's guts out and put in a new one and see what happens.

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