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Planet Heaven

 I’m taking a little break from The Space between Atoms this week to share some news.  I hasten to add that the “struggling” part of “blog of a struggling writer” doesn’t refer to the struggle to write.  It’s the struggle to get published.  The Space between Atoms is finished, just being unveiled slowly.

The news involves overcoming, for a little while, the struggle of getting published.  My twenty-fourth story, “Planet Heaven,” has been accepted for publication.  It will appear in the next issue of Sein und Werden (“being and becoming,” roughly).  This particular story was finished ten years ago.


I submitted it to a now defunct mag.  They didn’t like it.  It sometimes takes me awhile to recover from rejection.  I suffer from what one of my friends calls aporripsophobia, the fear of rejection.





Then there was a publishing website—I forget its name—that had a call for submissions that was perfect for this story.  I submitted and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  I’ve got so many stories going at any given time that I figured I could hold out until the publisher responded.  Before I knew it, years had passed.


I reread the story.  Damn, it was good!  I tried another publisher.  After several months of not hearing back, I tried Sein und Werden, for a themed issue.  They liked it well enough to put it on the docket.  I’m very pleased.


As a formality I wrote back to the one press that hadn’t yet responded (I think the years and years press went out of business) only to have them reply that they had rejected it for being “too preachy” and “anti-religion.”  Those two things, it seems to me, contradict one another.


I withdraw stories so very rarely that I’d prefer to think the decision was mine.  Still, some editors feel they’ve got to keep the upper hand, even when silence was all that was expected in return.  Or maybe even a “thank you.”


I’ll post again when “Planet Heaven” appears so that anyone interested will be able to read it.  Until then, keep writing!

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