Living the Fictional Dream

Head on over to Every Day Fiction and check out my flash piece, “Frigid.” It was the story of the day on August 21st, so I’m a little late in posting the link here. There were some technical difficulties with the original release, though, which caused missing text. Now, however, thanks to Camille at EDF, the story has been reposted in full.

This story is set in my superhero universe — the same universe as my stories in A Thousand Faces (”Zero to Clean in Ten Minutes or Less,” “Bridge Club,” and “Dinner for Three,” which is forthcoming).

The story was inspired by a prompt from my writing group’s monthly contest. The prompt was to write about ice with the bonus challenge of writing about it in an unusual way. I wanted to make ice my main character.

If you enjoy the story, EDF allows you to comment and vote on it. You can also comment here. I’d love to know what you think.

A post I originally published on this blog has been accepted as a 2-part blog entry over at EDF’s Flash Fiction Chronicles. You can read it here and here. And while you’re there, stick around and read some of the other entries. There is some good stuff over there.

First of all, I’m excited to report that my story, “The Wall,” will appear in the September 2009 issue of Hypersonic Tales. This publication provides readers flash fiction in both text and audio formats. I’m excited, as this will be my first audio publication.

Second, go check out EDF’s Flash Fiction Chronicles. There is a new article up about writing communities for flash fiction authors written by Alex, and if you scroll down a little further, you’ll see the details for an interesting writing contest — the FFC String-of-10 Contest.

Oh, and this is a little belated, but nominations are open for EDF’s 2008 anthology. Stories published between September 2008 and August 2009 can be nominated. If you’d like to nominate a story (and I’ve had several good ones in, such as “A Million Faces” and “The Care and Feeding of Your Sleeping Knight” — look at my stories page for links), go here.

Finally, a couple of story links for your perusal (I don’t think I’ve linked these here yet) — “Love, Death and Doughnut Holes” by Stephanie and “Tears of Clobbersaurus” by Jens.

Murphy’s Law strikes again. I haven’t gotten a story accepted in a few months (mostly because my submission and writing output have been down due to pregnancy and baby-related things), but, of course, during the time that our little girl has been in the NICU, two acceptances arrived.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to be accepted, but, for one of them, the timing turned out to be disappointing.

First, though, let me say that a superhero flash piece that I wrote, “Frigid,” is going to appear in Every Day Fiction on August 21. And, look, my name is mentioned in the Table of Contents blurb. That’s a first! I’m excited to be back in EDF, as it’s one of my favorite short fiction publications.

The other acceptance didn’t work out so well. I won’t mention the name of the publication, but they emailed me on July 22 to accept my story for the August issue. To appear in that issue, I had to return the contract to them by July 29.

Maybe it’s just me, but what a short response window! Maybe I’m just used to most publications who accept you for months in advance? If only they’d accepted me for the September issue or something…

I won’t complain about their editorial policies. I understand, they have to do what’s best for their publication. And, I’m sure that they deal with story acceptances where they author disappears on them on a regular basis. I’ve read policies for dealing with that in many publications’ guidelines. So, from the editor’s perspective, I understand why they had to rescind their acceptance of my story.

On a personal level, though, I’m bummed. It’s frustrating that one of my few acceptances this year was rescinded because I was spending so much time at the hospital with my little girl that all my writing stuff (and most of my email in general) got left by the wayside. (Not that I would change a decision that I made — Summerlyn is the most important thing right now, and she’s doing really, really well. We’re hoping she’ll be home soon!)

The other thing that’s disappointing is the particular story in question that was rescinded. This story is cursed, I think. It was nearly accepted several times, but not. Then, the first time it was actually accepted, the ‘zine folded before they could published it. Now, it’s accepted again and then due to timing will still not be published. **sigh** Maybe I should give up on it!

While I have no hard feelings for the publication in question, I will say that this experience has made me appreciate EDF’s contract-on-submission method a lot more. It makes things so easy at the end of the process. There is no question that the story can be included in the issue in question and acceptances go off without a hitch.