Usually, when a half-dozen or so magazines have turned down one of my stories, I go back to see if I can improve it. Usually, the story is accepted on my next round of offerings. Once in a while, I have another go at improvement, but then I may stubbornly think it’s a good story and keep sending it out until
some second- or third-tier magazine likes it.
My “Gigolo” set a record, turned down seven dozen times (!) before Goat’s Milk Magazine, a Canadian online litmag, accepted it.
They published it with some typos, including my name (!), but you can read it at their website, here==>>
Or at mine, right here==>>
here and there from the author’s own life. Even science fiction usually involves some very terrestrial human emotions.
The Creativity Webzine, took only four days to snap it up and make it the lead piece in their March issue. You can read it 
contents of an older friend’s decorative shelves. Not sure what to do with it, I set it aside. A year later, the germ of a short story came to me; I finished a first draft, called it Bric-a-Brac Secrets, and set it aside to ripen. Another year went by; I polished it, renamed it, and began sending it out.
stories: The setting, often, and some of the characters.
flood of memories, but it’s had a hard time seeing the light of day. It was accepted four years ago by The Violet Hour, a literary magazine that went defunct a few months later. When I finally figured that out, I sent the story off to another magazine called Aftermath. It, too, went out of business, although it took me long months to discover that my story was still homeless.
Elizabeth Ann Atkins, one of the Two Sisters who awarded The Daddy Tree a prize, invited me to her weekly YouTube writing conversation. I of course accepted: Something new to try, decades after I was the one doing the interviewing on WFSB’s Face the State
when Two Sisters Writing and Publishing opened a contest for ‘magical realism’, I thought of the deep woods where my lifelong pal Steve and I played a bow-and-arrow game in our junior-high years. Two Sisters had published my “Limerence” as a winner in their 2018 contest anthology; maybe I could try giving that forest a voice.
and grandchildren to a senior retirement community like mine. A year ago I was struck by the enthusiasm of a daughter who didn’t look in the least like the father she came to see and help. I was prompted to concoct a short story that was in due course turned down by more than a dozen literary magazines.
