Standing at the Trailhead of Winter

Mused: BellaOnline Literary Review No, today isn't one of my two blogging days for the week, but I wanted to share the link to Mused: BellaOnline Literary Review for those of you who would like to read the short story accepted for publication there. The story is under Fiction and is titled "The Garage Sale." And, those of you who do read the story, please let me know what you think, good, bad, or ugly. I'm in the process of putting a short story collection together, and I need as much feedback as possible to make the collection as strong as possible. In any case, I hope you enjoy it.

Yesterday, around 2 in the afternoon, I was checking my email, not really paying attention to the one I opened as I was talking to Hubby at the same time. We were chatting, my eyes scanning the opening of the email, and all the sudden I saw the word submission . My mind went on alert status. I went back to the beginning of the email to read it through slowly. The first three lines were the usual Dear JK, thank you for your submission to, we appreciate you thinking of us. The next line then said the words all authors want to hear: your piece has been selected for publication. At that point, I threw my hands in the air and waved them around, telling Hubby my happy news. The next paragraph, though, is what really warmed me through: "We have received a large number of amazing submissions for this issue and the selection process was very challenging. Your entry stood out as a high quality creation. Kudos for a job well done. " How nice is that?!? Nothing else in the world ma...

Sigh. I'm not sure reading rejection letters will ever get easier, but today's rejection letter gave me some hope  the editor's final decision to not publish my story was a difficult decision. A couple of lines past the rejection part of the email I received was this: "You should know that there was considerable discussion here at Stymie about the piece, but it just wasn't quite the right fit. I really hope you'll submit again in the future. For my part, I'd be interested in a shorter piece suitable for our web content." The usual sting of rejection didn't hurt quite so much after reading that. The part about "right fit" I don't totally get. I do know that finding the right target for a story can be terribly difficult. My particular piece is about a boy playing basketball but is told through the eyes of his mother. Stymie is a sports lit magazine, and like many other sports related mags, it gives more space to baseball and golf....