I'll never fit in at WalMart... Jess has been on at me for a while to do 'something' with the fiction I write. It doesn't really have a home unlike a lot of the non-fiction stuff I do and as fiction in general is hard to place I tend to write it and then forget about it. Stuff I throw up on here tends to get a decent enough response and I know a few people who get paid LOTS of money for writing fiction that have said a nice word or two as well, but I never tried to get picked up by a magazine or anything like that. Jess reminded me of an article she saw via Boing Boing a while back about an attempt to pay short story writers a decent 'wage' again through a new online magazine launching in the new year and suggested I drop them a submission. Reading through the other submissions online I knew I'd have a hard time writing that kind of thing, but to please Jess I dug out something I wrote a while back and posted it up this morning. I was half expecting the readers to take me to task, but the first response I got was from one of the magazine 'minions'. It's a doozy of a reply :)

I knew from the first line I wasn't going to like this. I was right. There _was_ one good line. "The red stickers were saved for anyone who looked French." That was funny. Anything else, -- ick. Followed by --Ick Spit. I get dystopias. I even get "if this goes on" stories. I do. Really. But. Mike, this magazine is attempting to focus on marketing to "other than the people currently buying small market sf." It's trying to market to the people who generally buy their reading material at walmart. We don't need to shock them. We don't need to be so weird, or so shocking, or have such surprize twist endings that no one can see them coming. We don't need that stuff. We _do_ need "thumping good stories." Look at the list of LEAD AUTHORS who have already committed to writing, or have already sold stories to BAS. Mike, try again, but please try with a story that could show up in an anthology in an end-cap at the grocery store. You might want to shop THIS story around to some of those small market sf mags. The ones that pay $5 a story or less. Rick Boatright

People buy stuff to read at grocery stores? I obviously need to get out more. And forget about my story for a minute, but people want to read something whose ending they see signposted along the way? You learn something new every day. I'm not knocking Rick, the magazine or the readership they're aiming at as we obviously just move in very different circles and have dissimilar ideas about what fiction is supposed to do. I only mention it here as it's the first thing that made me laugh out loud - especially that last line - since I heard that China died. [Music: The Mars Volta - A Missing Chromosome]