It’s been a while since I reached into my giant stack of rejection letters, so I decided it was time to consult the Gods of Randomness to see which section and document I should pull out and scan for everyone’s edification. This week, they chose the letter “M” and the eighth position, which is somewhat appropriate, since that rejection was for a short story called “Love and the Tides of Darkness” (hereafter “LatToD”) that I originally wrote specifically for an anthology called On the Eighth Day, the theme of which was something to the effect of “What happened after the end of the beginning of the Old Testament?”, or something like that. (Hey, it was a long time ago, I don’t remember exactly.) In a nutshell, the concept of “LatToD” is that, near the end of the 20th Century, a potential new Savior of Mankind is born. Heaven sends an angel to guard him, and Hell sends a demon to assassinate him; but the angel and the demon turn out to have been romantic partners, back before The Fall, and they end up getting so sidetracked in squabbling with each other that neither one of them carries out their mission, leaving said potential Savior to go ahead and completely screw up his life all on his own.