#ShareYourRejections where do I start! I sometimes tell this when invited to talk to students - I only got into writing short stories properly when I met this writer and learned about the process of submission and rejection. The very idea of a rejection was exciting!
It meant someone was actually reading it! So that was very cool. With short fiction writing, the only thing you could ever hope for is to increase your batting average of rejections/acceptances, but that's ALL you can hope for.
And, of course, hope an actual contributor to the anthology dies so you end up selling the story they initially rejected (this genuinely happened to me).
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So a random observation as I wait for my pizza. I recently re-read what I consider one of the best fantasy novels of the 20th century, John Masefield's MIDNIGHT FOLK (1926) - also one of the best children's novels of the 20th century, when it comes to that. Anyway--
Modern sf/f narratives almost uniformly have at stake the fate of the world. Now admittedly this goes way before LoTR or what not - Arthur, the Fisher King, the Waste Land etc. maybe set up the template, which is then explored in commercial plot terms. Anyway--
What's at stake in MIDNIGHT FOLK - what everyone's after - is... treasure.
That's it. And they're not after this treasure (the lost treasure of santa barbara) for any great mythical or world-saving reasons. the witches+wizard are after it because it's worth money.
One each from Pakistan, Peru, Egypt, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobego, Virgin Islands, Ukraine, Venezuela, Norway, Iceland, Malawi, Korea, Hungary, ok I am running out of twitter space now #WorldSFStats
Sodor... shit. I'm only in Sodor. Every time, I think I'm gonna wake up back on the train tracks. I'm here a week now. Waiting for a mission. Getting softer. And every minute Thomas runs the rails he gets stronger.
Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission. And for my sins, they gave me one.
I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles tracks that snaked through the war like a circuit cable...plugged straight into the Fat Controller's brain.