I don’t understand markets. Honestly, it’s a miracle that I have ever had anything published.
As some of you will know, last year I wrote a cycle of short stories that all take place at the Canadian National Exhibition. One of them, “Romancing the Oracle,” is a sweet romance about a psychic who can tell people’s near futures (a recurring character in the story cycle) and a boy with hair that seems to have a mind of its own. I thought this would be the first story to sell. It has had the most rejections of any story in the cycle.
Then, there’s a story called “Universes Leak Out of My Ears.” It’s about a comedy writer named Ira Nayman who takes a job as a magician at the CNE. Because he’s basically incompetent, he decides to make it a comedy act. Except he was reading up on magic in an ancient text, and the spells he thought he made up actually end up doing weird shit. I thought this story was too self-referential (or, depending upon your point of view, too self-indulgent) to sell.
Wouldn’t you know it, there’s a publication called Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction. And wouldn’t you know they accepted the story. The thing about this is that this isn’t the first story of mine that I thought was unpublishable that found a publisher. In fact, it isn’t the first time this has happened in the past year.
I don’t understand markets.
You can get a copy here.