Let's do this again!

Absolutely “effervescent” with the recent placement of one of my short stories, I thought I’d try sending out another oldie but goodie that’s been languishing in my story subdirectory for too long.

It’s a short, short story — only about 1600 words — and it is pretty much in the middle of the middle of the science fiction genre. The story is simple enough, but it builds to what I think is a clever and humorous twist at the end. I’m sure it was inspired by an Isaac Asimov story I read years ago.

I had shopped this story around quite a bit a few years ago. I even had the chance to get it in an anthology that had considered two of my stories. I chose to have them print what I thought was the stronger story, so this shorter, funnier story missed out. Since then I’ve had a few near misses, with some encouraging rejection letters, so I was certain the story itself was good. The problem was more in finding the market. I was not sure there was a lot of call for science fiction stories with funny twist endings. But once I got the bug to try shopping this one around again, I spent about ten minutes looking until I found an ezine that stated it is interested in humorous science fiction short stories.

Response time is an interminable 30 days. How am I going to find the patience to endure that?

Update: The story was declined by the magazine, but their email response went into my spam folder, so I didn’t even realize it was there for more than two weeks. (I’ve had this happen once before, and it was when I had sent in a story through the site’s online submission function rather than through an email.)

Oddly, they said the story was too long. But they said there was good writing in it and that the twist ending was good, so I’ll take that much.

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Tags: science fiction, short story, submission

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