My story, The Lucky Strike, submitted two weeks ago to Baen’s Astounding Stories spawned the following response from Paula Goodlett, their Slush Reader.

I’d read this before I left and like it quite a bit. As well, Rick Boatright pointed it out to me and he likes it quite well. We both think it’s a lot of fun.

We do, though, think it would benefit from a bit of tightening up. Would you take a run through it, looking for excessive words and see what you can do? There’s some repetition you could do away with. I’m probably sensitive to it, since Eric just got through making me jump through hoops on a rewrite for the same thing. :-)

This is an interesting development. It feels like some kind of strange illicit relationship is developing. I may spend the weekend rewriting the story. Please stand by…

About Lucky Strike:

I wrote this in late 2001 at IBM. I was during the final days of my employment there when there was very little to do. I did not write it for publication, but just rambled on until I got to a stopping point. When the submission bug hit me back in the beginning of 2004, I found it on a backup CD, gave it a polish and a new ending, and I shipped it off to Jonah Listner who put it on his short lived website. When Jonah disappeared, I thought that the story was dead forever, after all it’s nearly 7,000 words of rambling adventure, and there are no ezines that want such a thing. I put it up at KeithGraham.com with my other stories that are out of print. It was then nominated in the 2004 Editors and Predators Poll for best story and wound up in the top 10. All of the stories that scored higher were romance fiction.