New story day!
Story: What I’d Want to Have Said Before You’ll Kill Me Again
Published in: Night Shades Mag [free]
Length: 100 words
Brief synopsis:
How the story came to be: I wanted to write a story that was 100 words exactly, as I’ve seen a couple calls for that kind of thing. But as I was working on it, I said “Well, what if it was only one paragraph? There’s some places for that!” and as I got further in, I then thought “lol what if it was also only one sentence? I bet I can do that.” And I did!!!
I tried a couple different ideas (one of them I’ve since got into a 500ish word draft), but the only one that I could really do was this. It’s based on my interactive fiction novel that is kinda on the backburner (shit’s expensive at that scale), so I have, like, 100,000 words of this world/story/characters written down. And here is…a 100 word slice of it.
PUBLISHING THE STORY
Relative Confidence Level Before Submitting: like, 2. Very weird and short so I could imagine a lot of places wouldn’t want to spend a lot on something this small.
Rejections before finding a home: 78…a new record! But that’s what happens when you have a fantasy/sci fi/literary/general flash. I never even burnt through all the 8c+ markets (I think I was still at 10c+ at the last batch of submissions)
The eventual home: Night Shades Mag. They were brand-spanking new when I submitted (they hadn’t even published anything yet!), so I got to be part of the first “issue,” which is really cool 🙂
