In October of 2012, I got my first pro-rate acceptance. I waited breathlessly to be able to announce it to the world once I’d signed a contract.
That day never came. The magazine folded, and I received a kill payment for the story from their bankruptcy.
Did I wonder if, perhaps, they had accepted all the stories submitted that month to make sure their creditors didn’t get the dough? Yes, but only right now, as I’m typing this. At the time, I was convinced this acceptance meant that save an accident of timing, I had a pro-rate saleable story, FOR SURE. After all, the story, “The Silver Dame and the Box of Mystery” had only gotten seven rejections before selling! And of all the stories I had written in the 2012 Write-a-thon, it was my favorite, full of action, humor, and even a plot.
The story had started with a prompt from my sister, “Write something with Kent and Celeste and sibling rivalry.” Kent and Celeste were characters from my First Novel, written in the sixth grade, about a fictional me who worked after school with a time-traveling, space-faring spy agency. Kent and Celeste are two robots owned by the agency, with different opinions on how disposable humans are. (They would later appear in my stories Celeste and Bobby Fisher and “Volatile Memory” which is in Flame Tree’s Detective Thrillers anthology. )
Back in 2012, I had recently had an epic bus trip to St. Louis with my football team. (It is a STORY.) So I set my tale in St. Louis, and on a lark made it a Noir style thing set in 1942. Because time travel is cool.
Okay, so, purchased, but then un-purchased. I looked the story over, tweaked it a bit, and sent it out a week later, to Fantastic.
It got rejected. No matter. Within a week, I sent it to Clarkesworld. Then to Escape Pod, then to Strange Horizons, then …
I better cut to the chase. I sent that puppy out 50 times. FIFTY. It is my record holder, the story I have submitted the absolute most, despite the fact that it only got one personal rejection among the 49 form rejections. I tweaked it quite a bit, mostly changing the ending and beginning, but I only changed the file name to keep a separate version once. I was that confident in the basic premise of the story.
(Or I was too pig-headed to admit that the sale had been more of a credit dodge than a shining endorsement of the story’s quality.)
So here I sit, 80 pro sales behind me, and my First Pro Sale is FINALLY coming to light. It is with great pleasure and immense relief I report that Zombies Need Brains Presents has purchased the rights to print The Silver Dame and the Box of Mystery.
This, my friends, is the stuff that dreams are made of.
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