I have three copies to give away of David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's anthology Year's Best SF 14, which includes my Interzone story "The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain." So let's do a little contest; the three winners all receive free copies of the book.

Here's the deal: In the next few days, I will be submitting a new story to Fantasy and Science Fiction. As most writers already know, F&SF processes submitted stories in a very fast manner. This isn't a complaint against the magazine--the simple truth is editor Gordon Van Gelder and assistant editor John Joseph Adams (aka Slushgod, who is the first reader for the slush pile) work extremely hard to respond to all submissions in a prompt manner. As a writer, I appreciate this.

So the contest will be guessing how many days it takes for my story to be rejected. For an idea on F&SF's submission response times, check out their Duotrope Digest listing. The date range will be based on how long it takes from mailing the submission to when the rejection arrives in my mailbox. My previous three submissions to F&SF had a rejection time of 7 days, 12 days, and 21 days, as listed in my Duotrope submission tracker.

The three people who guess closest each win a book. If by some unlikely chance the story is accepted, I'll throw all the entered names into a hat and draw the winners. And if more than three people pick the same winning day, the hat will also be used to pick the winners from among those people.

If you want to track the contest, you can follow my submission progress at twitter.com/jasonsanford. To enter, email me your name and rejection guess to lapthai (at sign) yahoo (dot) com. And please make sure you have a snail mail address I can send the book to. And yes, anyone anywhere in the world is welcome to enter.