This is a terrific story by Nicole Kornher-Stace from Fantasy Magazine.

I sold my car. I now have enough money to pay off my credit cards, put some in savings, and get married.

I might write about cars tomorrow–a life history in four and six cylinders, what it means to be mobile. But right now, I’m pleased with my writing, and I wanted to share this:

“Nestor,” I said. He didn’t look up, so I repeated the name, louder this time. He flashed his gaze up at me. For a second, an image sparkled in my mind: sunset on Andromeda Prime, deep red light burnishing to brown. Then it was gone.

“Yes?” he answered softly. Too softly. It was like he had no back bone at all. I sighed.

“We’re bringing you with us,” I said. “Away from here. Some place safe and not so . . . morbid.”

“Yeah!” Eb interrupted suddenly, brightly. “We’ll take you to my planet. Andromeda Prime. It’s a beautiful place. Very green. Not quite so fluorescent as this, but there are many plants, and much blue-green water. What’s the color called? Turquoise? And the sky is a sort of purple. It’s very warm there now. Nearly high summer. We can take you on a barge.”

I turned to Eb, narrowing my gaze, staring. His eyes were huge and black—his pupils almost seemed to spill over to the whites. It was an expression I’d seen before, plenty of times—one I’d heard matched to his eager babbling often enough, too. But never to anyone else. That sort of excitement had always, before then, been directed at me, and only me.

But Eb didn’t even notice how I stared at him. He was too busy watching Nestor rub his hand slowly against the back of his neck.

Dee notices Eb noticing Nestor. I love awkward love triangles, teenaged jealousies. I want to write honestly about those things, even when the parties involved are aliens.

Really nice rejection from GUD Magazine this morning, after the story in question was short-listed:

Hi Phoebe

It was a really hard decision to send this piece back to you as I
thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Unfortunately I don’t have room for it
in my issue. A lovely retelling, though.

Best of luck with this piece in other markets.

Sincerely,

Debbie Moorhouse

Sweet, right? I’ll be shipping the same story off to Strange Horizons, I think, as soon as I get home.

When I first started sending out work, I didn’t really appreciate the importance of nice rejections. Mostly, I just felt burned. Now, though, particularly as I’ve been sending out work to “bigger” (i.e. paying) markets, nice rejections are a little rarer. Generally, I’m starting to appreciate certain things about publishers. Namely, the type of consideration they seem to give your work, how easy (or difficult) they make it to submit to them, an absence of border-line insulting form letters. Form letters, I understand, are a necessity. But the ones with the little jabs–I’m looking at you, Ploughshares (“We regret that the manuscript you submitted does not fit our current editorial needs.” Yeah, I regret it too.)–just really get to me. They don’t strike me as particularly respectful.

I’ve talked about this before, but I generally don’t send out mail submissions. There is really no reason for this other than laziness. It’s work to do so, and the sort of work that is easily put off. That’s simply not true of places that accept online submissions. I’m not saying that the work of sending writing out isn’t necessarily worth it, only that it’s easy to procrastinate on when there are more attractive alternatives (namely, believe it or not, writing) available, or when there are easier submission systems available. I can’t tell you how many times in the last year I’ve meant to submit to some place that only takes mailed submissions only to find an equally high-quality and reputable market that takes online submissions.

And I appreciate that the editors in question want to make it easy for me to contact them. Like considerately written form rejections, it makes me feel valued. In fact, I’ve often heard editors cite one common argument against online submission systems: that they cause too many people to submit. Somehow, I fail to see that as a problem–and I’ve read slush before! More submissions mean more crap, sure, but undoubtedly it also means that more quality writers will be approaching markets they wouldn’t otherwise consider. That, to me, is a good thing.

And it could be naive of me, but I have trouble seeing how it could possibly be a bad thing for an editor. I assume that editors are in it, in part, to discover new and exciting writing–not to hold the golden gates of publication closed from the slush-stained masses. I assume that editors value their writers’ time and contributions, even when that expenditure of time–on either side–doesn’t result in a sale.

I assume, I assume, I assume.

Wordle clouds of my most recent fiction:

(Current novel-in-progress)

(Modern retelling of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter)

(Unedited novel)

From this, one can draw the following conclusion: I talk about eyes a lot.