Alison's Journal

I got a frustrating rejection today on an adult fiction story... I'm quite sick today & barely managed to change out of my pajamas at 3:15 to trudge out to the mailbox, & seeing my SASE in there didn't make me feel much better! ;-) The rejection said, "too short for us," which bugged me because they say they take stories of 2,000+ words, and this one was 1,993 words, which to me is approximately 2,000 words. True, I wasn't really thinking about word count when I mailed it, or else I would have fleshed it out a bit first--this was a second sub to the magazine after my first was returned with a request that I send more, and I just sent the best story I had ready--but if I'd added 7 or 10 or 25 words before sending it, would that really have made a difference? It probably wouldn't even take up more room in the magazine if I had. (In truth, I had just cut a few hundred words from it earlier to get it short enough to enter in a contest, though I don't think I kept the wordier draft!) Oh well, whatever. Now back to resting! Being sick is no fun, especially when you have preschoolers underfoot!