Living the Fictional Dream

Two strange things happened to me today when I logged onto my writing email account. First, I found a rejection note from a market that I sent to eight months ago (eight months and one day, to be specific). That in and of itself is weird enough — most places I’ve submitted to thus far in my career aren’t that slow.

The rejection itself was actually a fairly good one (as far as rejections go). It said that the editor liked my story, which was what took so long, but ultimately it wasn’t a good fit for the publication. OK… fine. However, the thing that makes this even weirder, is that I had emailed this market back in March and withdrawn the story from their submission queue because it had been accepted elsewhere! Perhaps they are reading all their emails in chronological order? If they are in the November emails now, they will get my withdraw request in another six months or so!

I couldn’t decide what to do about it. Part of me wanted to fire back an email saying that it had been accepted elsewhere and withdrawn months ago. However, ultimately, I decided not to. I don’t know if I will submit anything there again (unless I’m willing to wait eight months to hear back!!!), but I figure it’s better not to burn a bridge.

The sad part is that this was my story that had been accepted by the ezine that folded. Poor little flash piece… it seems destined never to find a home!

The other weird thing that happened today was that I may have gotten an acceptance. It was kind of unclear. My story had passed the publication’s self-imposed response deadline, so I emailed to query its status. The editor emailed back to say that it had done OK in the voting and been forwarded to someone else who was writing the replies. This was followed by a mention of deciding which issue it was going to be in.

OK… yes, it is an acceptance (so, yay!!!), but I’ve never had my query responded to as an acceptance. And it was kind of funny, because it never specifically said that my story had been accepted… it just sort of… alluded to it. Very atypical.

However, I’m excited that this little flash piece found a home. I wrote it based on a prompt from my writing group’s monthly contest earlier this year, and this was the first place I ever sent it to. There is something really cool about a story getting snapped up at the first place it’s sent.