Mike Douton's Stuff and/or Junk

Today I submitted two short stories to different places. I think I might barf.

Also, barf is not a slang word I hear too often anymore. Is that a regional thing, like when I went to college in New Hampshire and took three weeks to figure out “boot?”

In my goal of becoming a Science Fiction Writers of America member, I went through their qualifying markets list and set to reading. One story has a bit of a horror bent to it and the other is … experimental. But also short. Very short.It took some reading to find a place which might be a good fit.

Finishing something is a relief, but sending something out into the world to stand up on its own is scary. It’s like throwing a puppy into the ocean and hoping it comes up. It takes a lot of effort to hand rear a puppy-story. You love it so much and are afraid to see anything bad happen to your puppy-story, so you let it hang out on deck all day. And days turn into weeks and so on and so on. The puppy-story is adorable but your boat is adrift and you need puppies to pull you to the Shores of Success. Well… maybe not the Shores of Success. The Shores of Small Accomplishment are pretty cool too. Regardless of which shores those puppy-stories pull you to, puppy-story power alone is what’s going to get you there.

So you throw it into the ocean.

Back to the “might have to barf” thing I mentioned before.

Maybe this is the one that makes it back to the surface.