Did I forget to mention...?

My story, "The Dueling Ground" was rejected by Abyss & Apex. Not a huge surprise...but the comments I received were puzzling.

The editor said " There's some beautiful language, but the opening has the character
pondering something that's happened, which means the story doesn't start
in the true narrative present."
Now, of course it was totally great to get a compliment like that, but...what, exactly, is the problem with not starting "in the true narrative present"? I've never heard of that before...
Hrmmmm.....

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In other news, the Zaurus is taking over my life. I'm learning Linux, I'm learning Ruby programming to help me understand computers better, and I'm digging into the guts of the thing to figure out how it works. Oh man. Mild obsessions...story of my life.

A frustrating thing...the "grand open source community" is kind of hard to get into. There are tones of pages and sites devoted to the information, but they all have the same info, presented in ridiculously convoluted and/or illegible ways, and they all seem to pre-assume all kinds of deep working knowledge of the systems involved; there is no real intro, no newbie sites, no in-depth FAQs.

This is why Linux will never take over windows--in order to figure it out, you have to deal with other users....and there's no QA monitor making sure they can actually communicate in comprehensible English.

Come on guys, let's get it together!