And... the story is back in the mail again. Go, me!
After a couple of days of post-rejection sulking, as previously mentioned, I did indeed gear up to send it out again. The block I ran into was where to send it. I had two markets competing (in my head, neither knows me from the bit bin) for next-up: a non-genre print magazine, and a webzine. The webzine's sensibilities sounded like a good match, but I'm still wrestling with my bone-deep belief that only dead-trees counts as "real" publishing. The print magazine has a four month response time. (Or six, depending on what part of their website you look at.) Seriously, you want to tie up my story for four months (or six)? And the arrogance conveyed by the sub guidelines was more than a little off-puting. I could have worked around the attitude or the four (or six) month wait (and if you're going to have that much 'tude, shouldn't you be able to make your own website internally consistent?), but the combination was tough to swallow.
I sat, and I waffled, and I procrastinated. Ultimately, the deciding factor was simple: The print magazine is open for submissions right now; the webzine will reopen for submissions in January. And I'd told myself I had to get the story back out sometime this month.
So, to the print magazine it goes. If it really does take them four (or six) months to respond (and so far everyone has rejected me far faster than their stated times), well, then I won't have to deal with submitting again for that long. (This story, anyway. One does hope I'll write something else again before then.) More importantly, I won't have to deal with having blown my own deadline. Would one day more really have mattered? Yes, yes it would have. I'm being pretty lenient on myself to avoid the taste of failure, but the flip side of that deal is that I really had better suck it up and hit what targets I set.
Target hit. On to the next one.
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