Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Short Story Short Story




Weird things keep happening when my short stories get published.

So last weekend Daily Science Fiction published the second short story they’ve accepted from me:  “The DSF Rejection Ceremony”. The origins of this story and its process unto acceptance were strange enough; I’ve written about it here already.

(That’s a lot of links for an opening paragraph. Let’s see if I can’t tone it down a little.)

Maybe a strange environment is just the natural state in which my short stories are published. Now that I think about it, that was the theme for my previous full post.

(OK, there went another link. I’ve got to knock it off now.)

Heck, when my last DSF story got published, it happened when I was studying abroad in Europe.

(NO. STOPPIT.)

It doesn’t help that DSF does not tell its accepted contributors when their stories will be published. After we sign our contracts, there’s not much else to do but wait and keep an eye on our email inbox. I do not criticize DSF for this informational gap—as long as there’s a good reason for it, such as shuffling schedules or something like that. At any rate, the point of all this is to say that I had no idea that “The DSF Rejection Ceremony” was coming out last weekend, which made things that much more interesting.

On that Friday morning, the first issue was that I needed more sleep.

I’m graduating college this month (yay), so as a decently-performing member of higher education my sleep schedule naturally gets pretty wacked out. I thought I was in for a treat when I woke up, looked at my watch, and saw that it was only 6:30 a.m. My first class on MWF starts at 9 a.m. “Great,” I thought. “I can get some more sleep.” So I did.

Then at 7:30 I figured, as long as the spring hours were brightening up my room this early, I might as well get up and get stuff done. Breakfast and Viking literature sounded pretty good. Rolling over, I looked at another clock in the room.

Which read 8:30.

Huh.

I double-checked my watch. After a moment’s observation and reflection, I began to regret three things: one, that I use my watch’s stopwatch function to time how long I need to brush my teeth before I go to bed; two, that my absent-mindedness sometimes forgets to turn off that stopwatch after I’m done brushing; and three, that my watch’s stopwatch looks way too much like my regular time display.

There would have been much more swearing if this had happened any earlier in the morning, I tell you.

After some quick prayers, I launched myself from my bed to my phone…where I noticed there was a little more activity than usual. The urgent folder of my email had two messages instead of one. One was the normal DSF story, and the second was that same story again—only forwarded to me by my older brother (also a writer). He’d attached a message to that email too. One word.

“Nice.”

Then I began to realize why Twitter and Facebook notifications were popping up.

But Our Hero had no time to meditate on—or even read—all of his phone’s activity. He had to book it up the hill to a journalism class, which he did just in time. Breakfast got postponed a little, and before I got any Viking Lit reading done I responded to the kind messages I’d received from readers. There were some good ones too. Here are a few examples:



And finally, one of the highest pieces of writing praise I’ve ever received…


Overall, in spite of the weird start…Friday was a pretty good day.

Thanks for reading!



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