Spamming the A button FTW

My son tells me that "FTW" is old and lame now, but I don't know another way to user gamer lingo to refer back to my "spamming the A button" technique of literary submissions I recently decided to follow. Basically, I decided to submit a lot more.

I kind of needed a win. 2017 started off pretty good, with a story getting accepted in January and then I got the call about the book in February. Since then, it's been a shut-out, even though I feel like what I'm putting out now is the best work I've done.

But two weeks into my submit-your-ass-off technique, Drunk Monkeys just accepted a story, so I'm off the schneid.

Actually, this is a story that wasn't even in my head until Friday night. I was driving to a friend's house for a reading discussion of The Enchiridion, when the story just sort of came to me. Parts of it fell into place while I was stuck in traffic, and I was actually tempted to skip my quaff of Lyon's Rum and an evening of camaraderie to hurry home and write before I lost it. Instead, I wrote down what I knew of the story on a receipt lying on the floor of my car, spent the evening with friends, made it home by 1 AM and wrote the beginning of the rough draft until 2. The next day, I went into work to catch up on some work I was behind on, then came home and finished the rough draft.

I showed Mrs. Heretic the rough draft, talked it over, fixed it up, and then sent it to Drunk Monkeys' 24-hour response on Sunday. Today, I got an acceptance. So a story I had never thought of 76 hours ago will now have a home soon.

Let me here just put in a plug for that 24-hour response. It's three bucks, which is what a lot of journals are now charging as a reading fee in order to wait for six months.