New story day! (1 day late)
Story: C:\Users\gnight\Desktop\who am i\README.txt
Published in: manywor(l)ds [web]
Length: <1,000 words (technically)
Brief synopsis:
How the story came to be: This was written as an entry for a flash fiction writing challenge. They supply prompts each week, and one of them was something like “write a note you’d leave for someone else on how to do something.”
I was really active on cohost, and it had a pretty big plural community, so a lot of those posts made their way onto my timeline. One thing that I saw suggested (and I thought was a very clever idea) was leaving a note for a new alter to find with all of the important information about “yourself” so they can function.
So that’s what this is based on (including details from my own life, of course). Those aren’t the codes to get into my apartment, but that is something that a new alter would need to know.
The contest had a word count limit of 750 words, so that’s what my original version was at. I wrote/formatted it in a txt file and had picked the images, too (they’re from the public domain part of the Library of Congress), but moksha doesn’t let you upload zip files…so I had to submit just a txt.
PUBLISHING THE STORY
Relative Confidence Level Before Submitting: like, 3 lol. I’m never really sure how to label works about psychology that use fantastical imagery, so where does fantastique really go? There’s also the formatting of it (I had a version as a word doc, as lots of places don’t accept txts), which is crucial to the piece, along with the monospace font. It’s…not really poetry. But it’s not exactly prose, either. In case you haven’t noticed by now, I write a lot of weird stuff that draws inspiration from other forms, including poetry. And I’m sure I annoy editors with my bullshit lol
Rejections before finding a home: 52 lol
The eventual home: manywor(l)ds. I had submitted it to someplace else, and I got a very unique personalized rejection. I was told it wasn’t a good fit for that market, but the reader loved it and wanted it for theirs! So it was kinda an acceptance to a place I hadn’t even submitted it to yet lol
Since manywor(l)ds does publish multimedia-type pieces, I asked if it would be possible to do something with that. My idealized version of this story would be just a folder/directory, and the reader would have to open it and look at the files, going into it totally blind (like a brand new alter would). But sending people a folder/zip is obviously not very viable lol. But manywor(l)ds was wonderful and wanted to make something unique happen, and that’s what I got!
So I’m very happy with how this came out and where it found a home. So please check it out, and I hope you like it!
