Bird? Or is that old?

See, that's what I kept thinking. I knew that (and "bint," thanks to Spike, which is not appropriate in this instance) but it seems dated.

Flower or Petal? Guess thats kind of old too. W need input from an actual English woman. Oh Fay...?

Flower or Petal?

I'm thinking more of a way to refer to a woman, not something you'd call her. As in, "I'm chuffed I met such a brilliant [insert word here]."

...woman?

Hush, you.

poppet?? (heh)

Amy, what's the sentence, otherwise? You don't want to over-slang it.

No one sentence. I've got a Brit hero, and I had him calling her a pretty bird at one point, and it just felt ... weird. I wanted to know if there was something I could plug in at different points (because he's North London, uses a lot of slang).

So I submitted a story in response to a call for submissions by an environmental magazine that doesn't usually run fiction. But it was a concept I thought I could do a decent job with, and I got some great beta on it (::waves at Betsy and Katie::). I was not surprised to receive a nicely-worded rejection, including a hand-written note from the fiction editor for the issue (a Hugo nominee this year).

All this happened months ago, but the SF issue of the magazine was supposed to run this summer, so I stopped by the website to see what they chose.

Turned out that they didn't accept any stories. The writers submitting had all failed to include one particular element in their stories--an element that the call for submissions had never mentioned.

Contrary to acknowledging this, the editor of the magazine merely snarked that the SF community "couldn't rise to the challenge", and published only the novella by the fiction editor of the issue.

I'm quite put out. I waste enough time in my professional life responding to poorly-written requests for proposals: why should I do it for fun?