Progress report: fiction

As of this weekend, I have four fiction projects out seeking audiences. My novel of 1402 Constantinople, A Gift for the Sultan, is being looked at by an agent. If it fails to find one in the next few months, I've promised to publish it somehow anyway, because it deserves to be read. (Some works of fiction are so vain they worry only about reviews and sales figures. Others, wiser, seek only readers, so that they may outlive their authors. This novel is of the second sort.) "Leaving Tegu" is a story about a restless American woman in Honduras, currently trying to attract attention at The New Yorker. "Morning in Santa Elena" is seeking acceptance in the handsome, newish journal, Terra Incognita. And now, finally, "Hunting the Thylacine" (a story of Tasmania) has gone to one story for its current contest, and also to the online workshop at Zoetrope.com. So now I must focus on the big nonfiction book with its rapidly-approaching deadline.