Short stories, usually in their entirety, that previously appeared in other print or electronic media.
So this week I was reading Valley of the Lesser Evil, by Carl Dane, which is not (gasp!) SF, fantasy, or (despite the title) horror, but is, in fact, an honest-to-God Western. It’s even set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, as Westerns should be.
So this week I consulted the Gods of Randomness and they instructed me to reach into my big file of rejection letters and pull item #9 out of folder “F”. There aren’t a lot of papers in this folder, and there would be even fewer if I had decided to file rejections from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under “M” instead of under “F”, but for whatever reason I went into the prepositional clause to sort this one. I know I sent a lot of stuff to F &SF (none of which was accepted) and there are only three rejection slips from them under “F”, so maybe I was inconsistent and there are more under “M”. We’ll find out at some point I guess.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, “The Light””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.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Maelstrom Magazine, “Love and the Tides of Darkness””So since last week I posted a rather depressing update on my Blue Roses progress, I figured that this week, I would cheer everyone up by dipping into my vast pile of rejection letters. 😁👍
On this occasion, the Gods of Randomness told me I should look in the “S” folder of my expandable file, which, as you can imagine based on the prevalence of “S” in the English language is one of the more well-populated ones. And what should I find on top in that section but two letters from the Canadian magazine Storyteller, of which one was, as expected, a rejection, but the other was one of those rarer beasts, an acceptance. So in the interest of inducing a little mood whiplash, I scanned them both. First, let’s do the rejection:
Continue reading “Random Rejectance: “Storyteller” Magazine”So this week, the Gods of Randomness told me to reach into my giant collection of rejection letters and pull something out of the section labeled “I”. Well, okay, they originally told me to pull something out of the section labeled “P”, but all the good stuff in the “P” section has already been done already. Could it be I’m running out of rejection letters?! Nah, there just weren’t that many magazines whose name started with “P”.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Indigenous Fiction, “Leech Field””So this week I reached into my vast trove of rejection letters, as directed by the Gods of Randomness, and pulled out this short rejection, from the old magazine Epitaph, a division of Pirate Writings:
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Epitaph, “Trailblazing””So this week I fired up good old Random.org and had it pick a letter of the alphabet and a position, and thus I reached into my vast trove of rejection (and a few acceptance) letters and pulled out this little gem, from when I submitted a story called “The Magician’s Finger” to a magazine called Glimpses:
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Glimpses Magazine, “The Magician’s Finger””Realizing it has been a long, long time since I did a random rejection, this week, I decided to fire up the old random number generator and reach into the old accordion file of denials (and the occasional acceptance). This time I was told to take the 26th rejection from the “D” folder, and so here we have this one, from Dark Regions magazine (which is still around, and is now the specialty book publisher Dark Regions Press), for my short story “The Last Vacancy”:
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Dark Regions, “The Last Vacancy””It’s been quite a while since I reached into my giant pile of rejection letters, so today I spun up random.org and it told me to pick the third letter from the “L” folder. As it turns out, this is a rejection from the magazine The Leading Edge for my short story “Draw”, a science fiction Western, previously excerpted in a Teaser Tuesday.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: The Leading Edge, “Draw””
As it’s been a while since I dipped into my trove of rejection letters, this week I turned to random.org, asked them for a letter, and got an “E”. So I reached into the folder and pulled out this nice one, from Pulp Eternity, which is either from the end of 1998 or the beginning of 1999:
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Pulp Eternity, “The Fold””
Viscosity 