I put Please Leave A Message up at Sciencefictional.com. This story was very short anyway, so it fits as a (longish) flash. I liked the concept of this story, but I am not really a horror writer. The story is even more crime fiction than horror. I sent it once to Cathy Buburuz at SamsDot for a horror anthology, but the her criticism was so biting that it made me want to burn it. Now, many months later, I don’t think that the story is that bad, it’s just light-weight and not a good fit in any genre. I put it on ScienceFictional with only slight changes. (This poses an accounting problem. The story is in my stats spreadsheet. Do I count this as a publication? It’s not a trunked story and it’s published, sort of. I can’t see counting this as an acceptance. If I delete it from the stats, it also deletes the reject, which is a real data point.)

All the nom-de-plumes that I use on Sciencefictional are inside jokes. I laugh when I see them, but don’t ask me to explain them. Jim Shannon has the only non-keithian story on the site, something I thought to avoid because I did not want to suffer by comparison to other writers. His story is more serious effort than any of mine. I hope I can get a more competitive story ready for the Oct 1 start date. I have one half done and another couple of ideas.

Other story news: I rediscovered another unfinished story last month and dashed off an ending to it. It came out to 4800 words, which is a long one for me. The story is only marginally spec-fic and is more like a 1940s Weird Tales story (think early Bradbury, but a little more sophisticated). I went to Ralan’s and quickly found a “semi-pro” zine to submit it. I did this quickly without thinking, noticing that the market had a reading period of August and I would have to send it then or wait until December. They had strict rules about the email subject for fiction and I screwed it up – I misspelled the subject line.

I have a history of bad luck with this market. They have lost 4 of my submissions in the past and I have never sold there. I am embarrassed to query about another lost story, even though the black hole has rejects from subs well after mine. Part of me thinks that they may be considering it, but most of me knows that I screwed up. I will wait until the end of the month and ship it out again somewhere else. I have to look for markets who want weird stories (not fantasy, SF or horror).