14^th try’s the charm

I real­ly like my short sto­ry “The Overnight Shift”. I wrote it last sum­mer, in a week­end, at the start of my 2016 writer’s retreat. It was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten as a con­test entry in the NYC Mid­night flash fic­tion contest.

Since I wrote it, I’ve been try­ing to sell it. It’s right at the 1,000-word mark, mak­ing it what they term flash fic­tion. There are a decent num­ber of pay­ing mar­kets for flash fic­tion, and I was start­ing to think I was going to have to try them all.

That is a screen­shot of my Sub­mis­sion Grinder screen for “The Overnight Shift”. The num­bers in the square brack­ets at the end? That’s [the num­ber of cur­rent open sub­mis­sions for a piece / the num­ber of sub­mis­sions this year / the num­ber of all-time sub­mis­sions]. Those 14 are all the times I’ve sent this piece out into the world. 13 times run­ning, it was reject­ed (twice it made it to the sec­ond round, where it was then pruned).

And final­ly, this week, I sold it. It will appear some­time in Novem­ber in The Arcan­ist, a rel­a­tive­ly new online SF/F ’zine fea­tur­ing flash fiction.

I’ll be sure to post here when it goes live. Trust me, you won’t be able to keep me qui­et about it.