Random Rejection: Maelstrom Magazine, “Love and the Tides of Darkness”

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.

“LatToD” made the first cut for inclusion, but the publishers ultimately decided to take the anthology in a direction where they decided the story didn’t quite fit and it was cut. I never saw a finished version of the anthology*, so I don’t know what that direction was; but I would characterize the story as “darkly humorous” so perhaps they got serious, sort of like Jane did.

Anyway, despite its getting cut from On the Eighth Day, I really liked this story and kept trying to peddle it for quite a while, for instance, to Maelstrom:

Wow, look at that! A URL from Xoom.com back when it was a web hosting company rather than a PayPal subsidiary peddling financial remittances! Well, at least it didn’t turn into a porn site like the URL for my old publisher Dark Tales did** …

Anyway, as so often happened with my stuff, the editor liked it, but not enough to publish it. I nevertheless continued to submit “LatToD” until after Y2K, after which—given that Y2K figured into the story fairly prominently—I decided a lot of the air had been let out of it and I finally retired it. You can read the story in its entirety here.

Incidentally, one reason I decided to do a rejection letter this week is that I’ve also decided to take another shot at working on one of my books. Since I don’t seem to be able to write on the book and do daily posts for the animals, I’m temporarily cutting back on my cartoon-style posts over there in order to free up time for this. We’ll see how it goes …

* I have in fact never been able to find any information about On the Eighth Day at all, so perhaps it was never actually published.
** DarkTales.com is no longer a porn site; the domain is now parked and for sale, in case anyone is in the market for it. And it appears to once again be associated with book publishing, sort of.