Skip to main content

Christmas Wish

 Persistence.  Although 27 doesn’t exactly equate to a tonne, it is a respectable number of stories to have published.  In addition to The Space between Atoms this week—it’ll be up soon!—I have had another acceptance to celebrate.


“Christmas Wish” has been accepted by Calliope, one of my favorite places to publish.  They seem to get my offbeat sense of humor.  This story came to me out of the blue and I wrote it very quickly.


I then sent it to a zine that didn’t have the courtesy even to reply.  I then saw a themed issue for a horror zine that looked promising.  They were doing a holiday issue and all I had to do was shift the tale from summer to winter, and presto!  It was a Christmas story.


The themed magazine liked it, but they said it had too much humor in it.  That sometimes happens when I write horror.  (Not always, as is implied by “sometimes”.)  This one was guilty as charged.  It is a fun story, I hope.





My next thought was Calliope.  Now, I’m not a member of MENSA (I don’t even know how to join), but Calliope is a great venue for stories that have strange humor in them.  I was pleased that they accepted it.  The only probably was Tom Petty’s issue, the waiting.


This year’s winter issue was full.  I’ll need to wait another year for it to appear.  It’s worth it.  In this biz when you find an editor who likes your work it’s worth the wait.  Probably in early 2022 “Christmas Wish” will appear.  I’ll add another shout-out then.  The Space between Atoms runs to 67 installments, so it’ll likely be done by then.  Hopefully there will be something lined up to follow it.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pacing

A criticism that I’ve occasionally received concerns pacing.  The short story, which today means up to about 7000 words, is a limited amount of space to establish mood.  My writing partner Elizabeth was reading a Poe short story recently and commented on how long it seemed. We’ve been accustomed, by the internet, to shorten things.  Flash fiction is in.  Say it in 1000 words or less.  What’s the correct pacing for a 300-word story? I’ve been editing a number of my complete, but unpublished, stories lately.  I’m trying to bring the word counts down.  I don’t want to be thought of as a plodding writer.  At the same time, I’m no action writer.  My stories are thoughtful. Some time ago I started reading Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire .  Dark, moody, and sensuous, this is a slow-paced novel.  Focusing on subtleties and emotions, she paints a writerly picture of the inner life of the undead. If I were an editor to...
Post a Comment
Read more

Small Town

I was born in a small town.  That’s not a quote from John Cougar Mellencamp; it’s the truth.  My hometown, which shall remain nameless here since it is sometimes easy to identify a person by such a small place, is who I am.  We are defined by where we’re from. After spending my first decade, which I didn’t realize was a decade at the time, in my hometown we moved.  We moved to an even smaller town.  A community of less than a thousand.  Industrial, dirty, and drug-ridden.  I began to write. Like most restless minds in small towns, I wanted to escape.  When I first saw the city, I was enamored.  So many people.  So much excitement.  So little community. This week I received the happy news that my story “Prom Night Redux” was accepted for publication by Exterminating Angel Press: the Magazine .  (More details to follow.) The story is close to my heart.  It is a story about being from a small town and wanting...
Post a Comment
Read more

Novel Thoughts

  I’ve been quiet for a while because I was working on a novel.   I’ve written novels before; seven of them.   Thing is, they’ve never been published.   One was under contract and then cancelled.   Now it’s under consideration again.   The other six are very patient. In addition to these novels, I’ve also written a nonfiction manuscript using my pen name.   It’s not published either.   The reason for this cross-over is that my current employment might become my past job if anyone read this piece.   Best to keep my identity false. Long-form writing is something I enjoy doing.   I do want some of the novels to be published, but it seems that you have to have someone take a chance on one before anyone will bother to look at another.   Such is the writing life. Just a thought, but for my fiction you need to give it a little time.   The first page might not snatch you, but the stories draw you in.   I read novels like that. ...
Post a Comment
Read more