It took a while, a lot of time, but I finally got a place to accept my short story Anatomy of Ruin for publication. It’s called The Chamber Magazine and the link is under Other Stories. Don’t worry about reading it. I rarely have time to read anything longer than peoples’ posts as it is. I’m just letting you know that even though I don’t post more than once a month here (and even though you didn’t ask) I am still writing.
I do believe it was the references to zombies that turned most people off, and who can blame them? I stopped watching The Walking Dead years ago. How many different ways can you see survivors decimating the skulls and eye sockets of the shambling masses? How long can they keep running, and why are the human monsters always worse than the undead corpses?
Most places offered pleasant rejections. However, at one sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction magazine, I entered a slot of 700-something, meaning 700 people were ahead of me to be read first. But the next day, the story had been rejected in Submittable by this magazine.
So I found a contact number and asked if something had gone wrong; there were 700 people ahead of me. How could my story have been rejected already? Someone actually wrote back and said, “Your story was read and assessed.” That was it. The tone was so frigid, I thought I’d somehow been transported, sans clothing, to the middle of Eastern Siberia.
I couldn’t imagine that someone who held themselves in that high a regard had actually read past the first two pages. But who knows? I wrote back, “Ouch.”
I really don’t blame them, but it really is an example of judging a book by its cover. The story isn’t about zombies. It uses them and the situation as a doorway into other topics. But that’s okay. Not everyone’s gonna be into an almost-apocalyptic semi-horror existential comedy about life, suffering, and the nature of hope.
However, if you’d like to see a short movie demonstrating the speculative fiction magazine essentially telling me to eff off (represented by the cat) and my reaction to it, here it is. Note the cool, detached fascination of the cat.
Laughter Over Tears 