A Respectable Rejection

Crap.

I sent my short story, “El Dorado,” the one that got an honorable mention in the recent Chizine short story contest, to Weird Tales on August 10, but just got the “Dear Horace” letter.

However, I take heart that it was a personal reply from the fiction editor and not a form letter:

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your manuscript. This is a well-written tale but is not quite right for me. Please try me again with something else.

Yours Weirdly,

Ann VanderMeer

Fiction Editor

Weird Tales

P.S. I grew up in Coconut Grove!

As far as rejections go, that’s about as good as you can get: a positive comment, a invite to send something else, and a personal aside.  Cool.

Now need to figure out where I’m going to send Eldo.  My tendency to overplay the humor may come at the expense of the horror, so I may be marginalizing myself a bit.

Tough shit.  If I’m going to fail, better to fail in my own fucked up way.

If you know of anybody looking for a story about an undead orthopedic surgeon called “The Handyman,”  his patient, a skeletal revenant named Larry and an ex-con drug dealer called “Crowbar Man,” let me know.