Episode 533: Racking Them Up...

Began the day with an acceptance from Six Sentences. I'm appearing in the next issue of The 6S Review, which means you're actually going to have to buy something to see my work in print. I think that's pretty damn exciting, even if it's just a flash fiction that's six sentences long. (It was actually something from one of Maureen Freely's class exercises last year. I just tweaked the punctuation to string the last couple of one-word sentences together.) This is after I was recently informed that Seedpod Publishing has accepted my tweet-length tale, which I just wrote on the spur of the moment a while ago and sent in. That's the thing with Twitter-based journals, I think. They force you to be interesting in very few words. Anyway, I'm ending of the night with a rejection from kill author. 'We enjoyed reading "Summer Heat" - particularly admiring the inventive approach to the story's structure - but ultimately didn't feel that the piece's themes or language quite suited it to our journal, so are passing on it.' At least they liked the structure, which was inspired by Mark Z. Danielewski's use of footnotes in House Of Leaves. (George Ttoouli didn't like that stylistic influence actually, although he liked the piece and saw further possibilities for it if I freed it of the 1234.5-word limit, which I might explore next term after portfolio deadlines and before the end-of-term examinations, or maybe even over summer break.) Have submitted it to another journal instead, as I am now firmly convinced that the story is good enough to be published, so I'm going to make it happen somehow. The trouble, of course, is that I'm not willing to pay for postage to submit work, so that shuts me out of the more 'established' names in the business. For this piece, formatting is somewhat important, so I needed to find a place that accepts electronic submissions via attachment. Not an easy task, I can assure you, but I've managed it, so I can go to bed now.