Random Rejection: Maelstrom, “Pinch Bobby ‘Til He Bleeds”

It’s been a while since I reached into my stack of rejection letters, so today I dove in and pulled this one out, from Maelstrom, for a short story called “Pinch Bobby ‘Til He Bleeds”.

Random Rejection: Clocktower

Today I reached into my massive pile of rejections and pulled out a relatively boring one from Clocktower Fiction’s webzine. This one was for “Love and the Tides of Darkness”, a short story that I originally wrote specifically for an anthology called On The Eighth Day. I really liked this story and tried to sell it to a bunch of different markets, but once the year 2000 rolled around, it was pretty much obsolete.

Random Acceptance: The Edge, “Singletrack”

So of course writing isn’t ALL rejection letters. At least, one hopes it isn’t. Case in point: One of my favorite short stories, “Singletrack”, which appeared in Greg Gifune’s magazine “The Edge”. And as a special yummy treat for those who have been knocking around the Internet as long as I have, please note the Geocities URL in the letter.

Random Rejection: Zoetrope

This week, I reached into the very back of my alphabetically-organized rejection list folder and pulled out this slip, from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Zoetrope” magazine:

Random Rejection: Marietta Publishing

This week, I reached into my vast collection of rejection letters and pulled out this double-sider from Marietta Publishing:

Random Rejection: Amazing Stories

This week’s random rejection is brought to you by the “Know Your Market” department:

Random Rejection: OMNI Magazine

This week I reached into my folder and pulled out a rejection from OMNI magazine:

Random Rejection: Design Image Group, “The Exclusive”

I haven’t done a random rejection in a while, so here’s one from 1998 from the Design Image Group.  DIG was active in book publishing in the mid-to-late 1990s and I tried a number of times to get something going with them, coming closest with “The Exclusive”, a vampire story that I originally posted here back in 2007.  I did eventually get it published in a webzine (I was an early webzine contributor), where it won a reader’s choice award for the issue.  But still, it would have been nice to see it in DIG’s anthology, which was released in December 1998 as Kiss of Death.

Short Story: The Patter of Little Feet

No random rejections, reviews, or scans of early childhood scribblings this week — it’s the last day of my vacation! But rather than let Sunday go home empty-handed from Scribblings, here’s a randomly selected short story from the unpublished archives. Any resemblance to Night at the Museum is purely coincidental, as this story predates it by many years; any resemblance to the “Zuni Fetish Doll” episode of the old Trilogy of Terror television movie, on the other hand, is less coincidental, although I play the scenario more for comedy than for horror.

One interesting thing about this story is its reliance on the Internet for a few plot points, making it probably one of the first stories I wrote that did so.  Another issue that befell this story is that, as I used to do with all my books and stories, it was originally stored in Microsoft Binder format — a format that has since been abandoned.  Although there is an extractor that is supposed to be able to pull the contents of a Binder file out into their component files, it didn’t work all that well on this file, and I was forced to reconstruct it by looking at the binary (gibberish-filled) Binder file itself, and piece the story together that way.  I think I got all of it, but I’m not completely sure (although I do know that the ending that’s there is original and complete). The moral of this story is to be wary of weird minor proprietary file formats, or else to make sure you always keep (and can run) a copy of the original software that created the files.

And now for our feature presentation, “The Patter of Little Feet”!

Random Rejection: Mindmares

This week’s random rejection comes to us from the small press magazine Mindmares.  The story in question, “Feeder”, is about how much May loves her sweet little birds, and the lengths to which she goes to provide them with yummy suet.  Given that this story comes out of my splatterpunk days, you can sort of imagine how she goes about it.