New story day!
Story: An Atomic Fairy Tale
Published in: The Lorelei Signal [free]
Length: <1,000 words
Brief synopsis:
How the story came to be: I was sick with some nasty (non-covid) bug and feverish in bed. Thought process went roughly as follows: what if atoms were dragons, and neutrons were their hoards? –> well doesnt uranium 23-something decay because it got too many neutrons –> that sounds like the kinda story you’d tell a kid to learn not to be greedy. I wrote it all on my phone and promptly fell asleep lol
PUBLISHING THE STORY
Relative Confidence Level Before Submitting: 3. It’s “fantasy,” but not in any semblance of a fantasy world you would recognize, and it has extremely hard SF (with exact numbers), so no fantasy market for “real” fantasy would want it. It’s extremely hard SF, based on real, actual science, but since the atoms are sentient, talking dragons, it is WAY too fantastical for any sci fi market that publishes “real” sci fi. And also the story will be very confusing if you can’t figure out that these are specific atoms undergoing a very specific process that was talked about for maybe one day in high school chem. And also it’s told as a parable/fable in second person, which isn’t a format a ton of people like.
I know that I write a lot of weird stuff, but even I knew that this was Way Too Weird for the vast majority of markets out there.
Rejections before finding a home: 20. You can probably guess which ones lol
The eventual home: The Lorelei Signal. They publish stories about women, especially complex ones, and what can be more complex than this!
