New story day! (Fashionably late, of course)
Story: A Tasting Menu of Autobiographical Botanicals
Published in: The Razor [web] [audio]
Length: <500 words
Brief synopsis:
How the story came to be: I know it sounds silly, but this came to me in a dream. It was one of those that happened the moment before you wake up at your regularly-scheduled alarm. It was flashes of various scenes of my life (not every one in this piece, and especially not the final one) and left me realizing, oh, Iām asexual.
I won’t bum you out by getting into specifics, but I had come up with a lot of reasons why sex wasn’t “working for me” like it did with other people. Oh, if I got this sorted out, then I’ll finally be into sex! But I needed to have all of these events presented to me, in this order, to make me realize the pattern.
The first version of this was a normal menu, with prices, which I thought was very clever. I shared it with some aces I knew for feedback, including [Ty Fox], a fellow frequent contributor at The Voice of Dog. He was a big help. Notably, he pointed out how it didn’t make a ton of sense as a regular “pick and choose” menu, why not make it a tasting menu instead?
This is why I really recommend people, no matter how experienced they are, to get an outside set of eyes to look at their writing. There might be something really obvious you haven’t thought of that could make your piece better!
The original title (which came from the dream) was “Fruiting Bodies,” which kind of makes sense, but not really, and I swore I had seen someone else use it recently (I had, which was someone else’s story I think is still unsold). But the current title gives the context of what this piece is, so I’m happy with how it turned out!
PUBLISHING THE STORY
Relative Confidence Level Before Submitting: 5? I’ve written/published a ton of “nonfiction” in the past, but never anything that was “creative” or autobio/memoir/”personal essay”-y, so I didn’t personally know many places where this could work lol
Rejections before finding a home: 2! This is the second time I sold something to The Razor that was with it’s first batch of submissions
The eventual home: The Razor. They were actually the first place to pay me for my fiction, so they’re always going to have a special place in my heart. So I was quite happy to have them publish another weird little short thing of mine!
